RDS for Oracle: Extending Outbound Network Access to use SSL/TLS

In December 2016, we launched the Outbound Network Access functionality for Amazon RDS for Oracle, enabling customers to use their RDS for Oracle database instances to communicate with external web endpoints using the utl_http and utl tcp packages, and sending emails through utl_smtp. We extended the functionality by adding the option of using custom DNS servers, allowing such outbound network accesses to make use of any DNS server a customer chooses to use. These releases enabled HTTP, TCP and SMTP communication originating out of RDS for Oracle instances – limited to non-secure (non-SSL) mediums.

To overcome the limitation over SSL connections, we recently published a whitepaper, that guides through the process of creating customized Oracle wallet bundles on your RDS for Oracle instances. By making use of such wallets, you can now extend the Outbound Network Access capability to have external communications happen over secure (SSL/TLS) connections. This opens up new use cases for your RDS for Oracle instances.

With the right set of certificates imported into your RDS for Oracle instances (through Oracle wallets), your database instances can now:

• Communicate with a HTTPS endpoint: Using utl_http, access a resource such as https://status.aws.amazon.com/robots.txt
• Download files from Amazon S3 securely: Using a presigned URL from Amazon S3, you can now download any file over SSL
• Extending Oracle Database links to use SSL: Database links between RDS for Oracle instances can now use SSL as long as the instances have the SSL option installed
• Sending email over SMTPS:
  • You can now integrate with Amazon SES to send emails from your database instances and any other generic SMTPS with which the provider can be integrated

These are just a few high-level examples of new use cases that have opened up with the whitepaper. As a reminder, always ensure to have best security practices in place when making use of Outbound Network Access (detailed in the whitepaper).