APEX 5 New Runtime API Lockdown Features

In APEX 4.x the developer could implement a feature that involves a call to the APEX API. E.g. you could create new pages on the fly if you would like to (just examine an export file for the how-to). You could drop an application using a procedure from the APEX_INSTANCE_ADMIN package. You could drop a user using APEX_UTIL.REMOVE_USER. If this is all on purpose and secured than that's fine. But maybe you created some opportunities for SQL Injection ... and someone else could use that technique to call those very same procedures. So the bad guy (or girl) could drop your application - or maybe even worse : could create a user and give himself full access to everything!

Of course you should prevent that from happening by fixing the SQL Injection holes. But next to that: You can prevent that your application uses those API's at all! And in APEX 5 that's even the default setting. So you're safe by default ;-)

But assume you really need access to those API's, there is an Application Level Security setting you can set.

So you can switch on access to API's that make changes to Applications or the Workspace. The only thing is - you have to figure out yourself what setting you should enable...

So what happens if your application has the option of creating a user on the fly - and thus calling APEX_UTIL.CREATE_USER - and you didn't switch the "Modify Workspace Repository" ?

Then you (or your user) gets this "nice" error page:

This sounds rather cryptic - and it is - but actually there is an entry in the Debug Messages with that ID. Even when you're not running in debug mode!

And this entry is:

But of course it is better to catch these errors (and all other ones as well) via an Error Handling Function. That way you can get an email when something like this happens and fix it - or be warned that some bad things are happening ....

But it's a nice additional security feature!

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