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SPDC: Secure Proxied Database Connectivity

Regateiro, D. ; Pereira, O. ; Aguiar, R.

SPDC: Secure Proxied Database Connectivity, Proc INSTICC Intl. Conf. on Data Science, Technology and Applications DATA, Madrid, Spain, Vol. 6, pp. 56 - 66, July, 2017.

Digital Object Identifier: 10.5220/0006424500560066

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Abstract
In the business world, database applications are a predominant tool where data is generally the most
important asset of a company. Companies use database applications to access, explore and modify their data
in order to provide a wide variety of services. When these applications run in semi-public locations and
connect directly to the database, such as a reception area of a company or are connected to the internet, they
can become the target of attacks by malicious users and have the hard-coded database credentials stolen. To
prevent unauthorized access to a database, solutions such as virtual private networks (VPNs) are used.
However, VPNs can be bypassed using internal attacks, and the stolen credentials used to gain access to the
database. In this paper, the Secure Proxied Database Connectivity (SPDC) is proposed, which is a new
methodology to enhance the protection of the database access. It pushes the credentials to a proxy server
and separates the information required to access the database between a proxy server and an authentication
server. This solution is compared to a VPN using various attack scenarios and we show, with a proof-of-concept,
that this proposal can also be completely transparent to the user.