Can the permssions on the oracle owned .profile file be hardened?

Products

• Data Loss Prevention Core Package

Issue/Introduction

An OS hardening policy is suggesting that the %ORACLE_HOME%\orabin\admin\.profile file have permissions lowered from 755 to 644. 

Environment

Oracle on Linux platforms. 

 

Resolution

As the .profile file is necessary for establishing environmental variables of the oracle user, including the ORACLE_HOME directory, base directory, SID, and potentially other path variables. retaining execute on this directory for the oracle user is necessary. It is untested, and not recommended that the permissions of the .profile file(s) be lowered.