Protecting your sensitive OpenInsight data.

Sometime ago, Kevin Ruane wrote an article on hiding your Linear Hash data from workstations, this prevented direct access to the data inside .LK and .OV files (Revelation’s Linear Hash data files).

At the time, this was just another useful benefit afforded the Universal Driver for users running Revelation based systems. However, in more recent times we have seen many headlines of high profile individuals and organisations loosing client and other sensitive data – headlines that no organisation can afford to deal with and that often lead to lasting damage to the organisation’s reputation.

If that was not reason enough to take data privacy seriously, organisations now have requirements to protect and audit access to data and this is becoming a more and more common request. For instance, compliance with industry security standards like the PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) is now a must have for anyone handling credit card information through their online systems or otherwise.

Revelation has published an update to the original article which covers one method to prevent unauthorised access to OpenInsight’s data held inside .LK and .OV files. Working with OpenInsight 9.2+ and the Universal Driver 4.6 over a Windows 2008 Server and Windows 7 workstation environment (so nice and contemporary) this new article details how to use strict NTFS permissions to achieve peace of mind for developers and end-users alike. After all, if your users can not directly read or change .LK and .OV files, you can audit and protect access to the data using controls that are internal to your application.

The full article can be found on http://www.revelation.com/ at http://tinyurl.com/32lhftq.

Why's my oinsight.ini file not working????

We recently had a support enquiry because the OInsight.ini file (located under C:\Windows) was not being picked up and the developer was therefore unable to change the Application Manager buttons to display the System Editor ++, rather than the old System Editor.

I’d always understood that the OInsight.ini file that OpenInsight used for these settings and others, was the one in the Windows directory. However, from Windows Vista and Windows 7, things are no longer that simple.

As Carl enlightened me, Vista and Windows 7 implement something called virtual file redirection, which means that the ini file the OpenInsight uses is not the one in C:\Windows - when it asks for the file Windows goes and gets it from the Virtual Store instead. It is Microsoft’s way of trying to stop people using ini files - they don't like you using the registry these days either!!

Anyway, the *real* ini file that Windows gives to OpenInsight is stored in your user settings folder something like:

C:\Users\[UserName]\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Windows\oinsight.ini

If you change that ini file, then everything should be fine and OpenInsight will display the right buttons and your other preferences/settings.

For the more technical and those who want to understand all of this in more detail, the following link will be useful:

http://windowsteamblog.com/windows/b/developers/archive/2009/08/04/user-account-control-data-redirection.aspx

OpenInsight running under Windows 7

Whilst it is early days in the Windows 7 release cycle, I was pleased to learn yesterday that Revelation in the USA have already begun testing of OpenInsight 9.x with the forthcoming Universal Driver 4.6 on the current Windows 7 release candidate. These preliminary tests are proving very positive with OpenInsight showing no immediate signs of having any trouble running under the new version of Windows. More will be published to this blog as the testing continues and more information comes my way