AUTHENTICATING USERS TO THE DATABASE

A basic security requirement is that you know your users: you must first identify users before you can determine their privileges and access rights. You must know who a user is so that you can audit his or her actions upon the data. Users can be authenticated in a number of different ways before they are allowed to create a database session. In database authentication, you can define users such that the database performs both identification and authentication of users. Passwords are one of the basic forms of authentication. A user must provide the correct password when establishing a connection to prevent unauthorized use of the database. Passwords are assigned when users are created. A database can store a user's password in the data dictionary in an encrypted format. Users can change their passwords at any time.