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The Voice of the DBA

Audio Attacks

There are running jokes about how Amazon Alexa and Google Home are susceptible to visitors in your home. It's become a bit of test from some geeks who will walk in your house and call "Hey, Alexa" out loud to see if you have a device that's available. I even had an accidental Siri activation while recording some content recently. I said something that started Siri listening on my phone and then a few people nearby kept trying to duplicate the effort. Fortunately Siri wouldn't come on, so no one was able to cause too much trouble. I suspect that the speakers in the recording room weren't positioned well enough to allow the control room based hacking.

I know that will change. In fact, even if Apple and other companies manage to get digital assistants to recognize specific people's voices (as rumored), technology marches on. People are already starting to fake audio data. The fidelity of digital recording and capabilities of speakers improve constantly. This is going to be a greater and greater issue over time, and I have no idea what security technique will prevent things. Maybe we need two factor authentication for audio commands? Won't that defeat the purpose?

As data professionals, we are going to be dealing with more and more types of data, and trying to process, analyze, and act on information. This is one reason that I think understanding data lakes and being able to import and combine many types and formats of data will be a valuable skill for all data professionals. Whether you use something like Azure Data Lake or another platform, I expect to be combining data in all sorts of ways and providing information to users.

While speech recognition might not be something many of us worry about, will we want to extract information from audio or video and use it? Do we expect that audio files have more integrity than other sources? I worry that we give some types of data more veracity than others, when all types are subject to hacking. Some of us may get audio files as data, and it's only a matter of time before we get hacked, perhaps with fake audio.

One of the issues we have with some data is determining the source of record. If I record my voice as a sample, and you compare all future audio of me to that sample, you can verify my identity, right? What if someone can fake my voice with simple software? It sounds crazy, but those days are coming, especially if our systems are susceptible to a person stitching together words from different captures, such as some of Baracksdubs. What might be worse is when we find someone hacking a database and replacing the samples. What's the source of record then?

As I spend more time in this business, I become more convinced that auditing and monitoring are more important that security. We want them all, but I'd rather know I have an issue than assume my systems are protected because the security doesn't appear to be broken.

Steve Jones from SQLServerCentral.com

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The Voice of the DBA Podcast

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The Voice of the DBA podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music.

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Question of the Day

Today's Question (by Steve Jones):

I've got this email address in my database: [email protected]. If I have an email masking function applied on this column, what data is returned to users that see masked data?

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Yesterday's Question of the Day

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If I want to get a list of files in my current directory in R, how to I get this?

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Featured Script

Transparent Database Encryption on all User Databases

Prem Kumar from SQLServerCentral.com

Applying Transparent database encryption is one of the important tasks which we need to do across the enterprise level databases.

Below script will apply the encryption on all user databases in a particular instance. The certificate needs to be created on all secondary databases in an Always-On environment.

USE [master]

--Create Master Key

CREATE MASTER KEY ENCRYPTION
BY PASSWORD='Azdb_pRd@2017';

--Create Certificate  
 
CREATE CERTIFICATE AZ_TDE_PRD
WITH SUBJECT='AZ_TDE_ON_PRD';
GO

--Create Database Encryption Key on each user databases

DECLARE @sql varchar(2000),
        @dbname varchar(64)
 
DECLARE apply_tde CURSOR FOR
   SELECT d.name
   FROM  sys.databases d
   WHERE d.database_id >4

   OPEN apply_tde
       FETCH NEXT FROM apply_tde INTO @dbname
       WHILE @@FETCH_STATUS <> -1
       BEGIN

            SELECT @sql ='USE [@dbname]
            CREATE DATABASE ENCRYPTION KEY
            WITH ALGORITHM = AES_128
            ENCRYPTION BY SERVER CERTIFICATE AZ_TDE_PRD'

            SELECT @sql = REPLACE(@sql,'@dbname',@dbname)
            PRINT  'Encryption Started --'+@sql
            EXEC  (@sql)
        
            SELECT @sql = 'USE [master] ALTER DATABASE [@dbname] SET ENCRYPTION ON'
            SELECT @sql = REPLACE(@sql,'@dbname',@dbname)
            PRINT  'Encryption Finished --'+@sql
            EXEC  (@sql)

        FETCH NEXT FROM apply_tde into @dbname
        END
   CLOSE apply_tde
   DEALLOCATE apply_tde


BACKUP CERTIFICATE AZ_TDE_PRD
TO FILE = 'C:\temp\AZ_TDE_PRD'
WITH PRIVATE KEY (file='C:\temp\AZ_TDE_PRD_PVT',
ENCRYPTION BY PASSWORD='Cer#Azdb_pRd@2017')

GO

SELECT
     DB_NAME(database_id) AS 'Database Name'
    ,create_date AS 'Create Date'
    ,set_date AS 'Set Date'
    ,(CASE
        WHEN Encryption_State='0' THEN 'No Database Encryption'
        WHEN Encryption_State='1' THEN 'Unencrypted'
        WHEN Encryption_State='2' THEN 'Encryption In Progress'
        WHEN Encryption_State='3' THEN 'Encrypted'
        WHEN Encryption_State='4' THEN 'Key Change In Progress'
        WHEN Encryption_State='5' THEN 'Decryption In Progress'
        WHEN Encryption_State='6' THEN 'Protection Change In Progress'
      END) AS 'Encryption State'
    ,key_algorithm AS 'Algorithm Used'
    ,key_length AS 'Key Length'
    ,encryptor_thumbprint AS 'Encryptor Thumbprint'
    ,percent_complete AS 'Percent Complete'
    ,encryptor_type AS 'Encryptor Type'
FROM sys.dm_database_encryption_keys
GO


After executing the above script, you need to copy the certificate to the secondary server in an always-on environment and create the certificate in a secondary server.  

This is also applicable if you are implementing the transparent database encryption in production and restoring it in test/development environment.

CREATE CERTIFICATE AZ_TDE_PRD
FROM FILE='C:\temp\AZ_TDE_PRD'
WITH PRIVATE KEY (
FILE = 'C:\temp\AZ_TDE_PRD_PVT',
DECRYPTION BY PASSWORD='Cer#Azdb_pRd@2017')

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