Home
Security
You can secure your Informix® database server and the data that is stored in your Informix databases. You can encrypt data, secure connections, control user privileges and access, and audit data security.
Security in HCL Informix®
The Informix® Security Guide documents methods for keeping your data secure by preventing unauthorized viewing and altering of data or database objects, including how to use the secure-auditing facility of the database server.
Securing data
Discretionary access control
Discretionary access control verifies whether the user who is attempting to perform an operation has been granted the required privileges to perform that operation.
User roles
A role is a work-task classification, such as payroll or payroll manager. Each defined role has privileges on the local database object granted to the role. You use the CREATE ROLE statement to define a role.
Role separation

Security
You can secure your Informix® database server and the data that is stored in your Informix databases. You can encrypt data, secure connections, control user privileges and access, and audit data security.
- Security in HCL Informix®
  The Informix® Security Guide documents methods for keeping your data secure by preventing unauthorized viewing and altering of data or database objects, including how to use the secure-auditing facility of the database server.
  - Securing data
    - HCL Informix® directory security
      utilities and product directories are secure by default.
    - Network data encryption
      Use network encryption to encrypt data transmitted between server and client, and between server and other server.
    - Column-level encryption
      You can use column-level encryption to store sensitive data in an encrypted format. After encrypting sensitive data, such as credit card numbers, only users who can provide a secret password can decrypt the data.
    - Connection security
      You can administer the security of the connections to the database server by using authentication and authorization processes.
    - Discretionary access control
      Discretionary access control verifies whether the user who is attempting to perform an operation has been granted the required privileges to perform that operation.
      - User roles
        A role is a work-task classification, such as payroll or payroll manager. Each defined role has privileges on the local database object granted to the role. You use the CREATE ROLE statement to define a role.
        Role separation
        Default roles
        An administrator can define a default role to assign to individual users or to the PUBLIC group for a particular database.
        Granting privileges for a default role
      - Setting permission to create databases
        Use the DBCREATE_PERMISSION configuration parameter to give specified users permission to create databases and thus prevent other users from creating databases.
      - Security for external routines (UDRs)
        External routines with shared libraries that are outside the database server can be security risks. External routines include user-defined routines (UDRs) and the routines in DataBlade® modules.
      - Enabling non-DBSA users to view SQL statements in an active session
        You can enable non-database server administrator (DBSA) users to view SQL statements in an active session.
    - Label-Based Access Control
      You can use label-based access control (LBAC), an implementation of multi-level security (MLS), to control who has read access and who has write access to individual rows and columns of data.
  - Auditing data security

Role separation

When you install a database server instance, you implement role separation by setting the INF_ROLE_SEP environment variable to a non-zero integer value. Role separation enforces separating administrative tasks by people who run and audit the database server. If INF_ROLE_SEP is not set, then user informix can perform all administrative tasks.

You cannot switch on role separation by resetting the environment after the server instance has been installed without role separation, and you cannot selectively implement role separation on only some of the databases of the same database server.

For more information about the INF_ROLE_SEP environment variable, see the Informix® Guide to SQL: Reference. For more information about role separation, see Using role separation.