In the latest critique of Oracle's security practices, experts are calling on the software maker to improve the mechanism used to secure passwords for database users. Researchers say they have found a way to recover the plain text password from even very strong, well-written Oracle database passwords within minutes.

The technique Oracle uses to store and encrypt user passwords doesn't provide sufficient security, said Joshua Wright of the SANS Institute and Carlos Sid of Royal Holloway College, University of London. Wright gave a presentation on the matter Wednesday at the SANS Network Security conference in Los Angeles.

In the presentation, Wright discussed how passwords are encrypted before being stored in Oracle databases and presented a tool he wrote to uncover passwords, according to a SANS statement. A paper by Wright and Cid is available on the SANS Web site.

Wright and Cid identified several vulnerabilities, including a weak hashing mechanism and a lack of case preservation--all passwords are converted to uppercase characters before calculating the hash.