Ensuring the Security of Your Production Environment

This section provides high-level descriptions of the security measures that can be employed to secure your Oracle BPM environment.

Securing the Oracle BPM Hosts

An Oracle BPM production environment is only as secure as the machines on which it is running. It is important that you secure the physical machine, the operating system, and all other software that is installed on the host machine. Ensure that the underlying operating system, database, and all required supporting systems are installed in accordance with the product documentation and configured to provide a secure operating environment.

The following are suggestions for securing your Oracle BPM host in a production environment. Also check with the manufacturer of the machine and operating system for recommended security measures.

Security Action Description

Physically secure the hardware.

Keep your hardware in a secured area to prevent unauthorized operating system users from tampering with the deployment machine ore its network connections.

Secure the networking services that the operating system provides.

Have an expert review network services such as e-mail programs or directory services to ensure that a malicious attacker cannot access the operating system or system-level commands. The way you do this depends on the operating system you use.

Sharing a file system with other machines in the enterprise network imposes risks of a remote attack on the file system. Be certain that the remote machines and the network are secure before sharing the file systems from the machine that hosts Oracle BPM components.

Use a file system that can prevent unauthorized access.

Make sure the file system on each Oracle BPM component host can prevent unauthorized access to protected resources. For example, on a Windows computer, use only NTFS.

Set file access permissions for data stored on disk.

Set operating system file access permissions to restrict access to data stored on disk. This data includes, but is not limited to, the following:


  • Third-party authentication directories
  • Portal configuration files

For example, operating systems such as Unix and Linux provide utilities such as umask and chmod to set the file access permissions. At a minimum, consider using 'umask 066', which denies read and write permissions to Group and Others.

Set file access permissions for data stored in the portal database.

Set operating system file access permissions to restrict access to data stored in the portal database.

Safeguard passwords.

The passwords for user accounts on production machines should be difficult to guess and should be guarded carefully. Set a policy to expire passwords periodically. Never code passwords in client applications.

Do not develop on a production machine.

Develop first on a development machine and then move code to the production machine when it is completed and tested. This process prevents bugs in the development environment from affecting the security of the production environment.

Do not install development and sample software on a production machine.

Do not install development tools on production machines. Keeping development tools off the production machine reduces the leverage intruders have should they get partial access to an Oracle BPM production machine. Do not install the Oracle BPM sample applications on production machines.

Enable security auditing.

Configure security auditing to enable monitoring of sensitive portal functions using the Audit Manager function.

Consider using additional software to secure your operating system.

Most operating system can run additional software to secure a production environment. For example, and Intrusion Detection System (IDS) can detect attempts to modify the production environment.

Refer to the vendor of your operating system for information about available software.

Apply operation-system service packs and security patches.

Refer to the vendor of your operating system for a list of recommended service packs and security-related patches.

Apply the latest Oracle BPM maintenance packs and implement the latest security advisories.

You are advised to apply each maintenance pack as it is released. Maintenance packs are a roll-up of all bug fixes for each version of the product.