In this blog post, we’ll look at a feature that recently added to Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.7.16, that makes it easier to configure Percona XtraDB Cluster SSL for all related communications. It uses mode “encrypt=4”, and configures SSL for both IST/Galera communications and SST communications using the same SSL files. “encrypt=4” is a new encryption mode added in Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.7.16 (we’ll cover it in a later blog post).

If this option is used, this will override all other Galera/SST SSL-related file options. This is to ensure that a consistent configuration is applied. Using this option also means that the Galera/SST communications are …

In this blog, we’ll look at how to setup and troubleshoot the Percona PAM authentication plugin.

We occasionally get requests from our support clients on how to get Percona Server for MySQL to authenticate with an external authentication service via LDAP or Active Directory. However, we normally do not have access to client’s infrastructure to help troubleshoot these cases. To help them effectively, we need to setup a testbed to reproduce their issues and guide them on how to get authentication to work. Fortunately, we only need to install Samba to provide an external authentication service for both LDAP and AD.

In this article, I will show you how to (a) compile and install Samba, (b) create a domain environment with Samba, (c) add users and groups to this domain and (d) get Percona Server …

Backup traffic

After securing application-to-database and replication traffic, you should also do the same for backup traffic.

If you use Percona XtraBackup with streaming than you should use SSH to send your backup to a secure location. The same is true for MySQL Enterprise Backup. Also both have options to encrypt the backup itself. If you send your backup to a cloud service this is something you should really do, especially if it is not sent via SSH or HTTPS.

And mysqldump and mysqlbinlog both support SSL. And you could use GnuPG, OpenSSL, WinZIP or any other tool to encrypt it.

Sending credentials

You could try to force the client to send credentials elsewhere. This can be done if you can control the parameters to the mysql client. It reads the config from /etc/my.cnf, ~/.my.cnf and ~/.mylogin.conf but if you for example specify a login-path and a hostname.. it connects to that host, but with the …

The mysql_sha256_password doesn't use the nonce system which is used for mysql_new_password, but instead forces the use of RSA or SSL.

This is how that works:

1. The client connects
2. The server changes authentication to sha256 password (or default?)
3. The server sends the RSA public key.
4. The client encrypts the password with the RSA public key and sends it to the server.
5. The server decrypts the password with the private key and validates it.

The problem is that the client trusts public key of the server. It is possible to use --server-public-key-path=file_name. But then you need to take care of secure public key distribution yourself.

So if we put a proxy between the client and the …

In my previous blogs I told you to enable SSL/TLS and configure it to check the CA. So I followed my advice and did all that. Great!

So the --ssl-mode setting was used a few times as a solution. And it has a setting we didn't use yet: VERIFY_IDENTITY. In older MySQL versions you can use --ssl-verify-server-cert. Both turn on hostname verification.

The attack

Get any certificate which is trusted by the configured CA, this can for example be a certificate from a development machine. And use that with a man-in-the-middle proxy.

Then the client:

1. Checks if SSL is uses (--ssl-mode=REQUIRED)
2. Verify if the certificate is signed by a trusted CA (--ssl-mode=VERIFY_CA)

Both checks succeed. But the certificate might be for testhost01.example.com and the database server might be prod-websitedb-123.example.com. …

One of the most interesting features introduced in MySQL 8.0 is roles or the ability of defining a set of privileges as a named role and then granting that set to one or more users. The main benefits are more clarity of privileges and ease of administration. Using roles we can assign the same set of privileges to several users, and eventually modify or revoke all privileges at once.

Roles in a nutshell

Looking at the manual, we see that using roles is a matter of several steps.

(1) Create a role. The statement is similar to CREATE USER though the effects are slightly different (we will see it in more detail later on.)

mysql …

In the last post I shared the simple set of steps to configure a Group Replication setup using SQL commands, and a few in the configuration file too. Indeed, it can be simple.  But then there are times where there are more requirements and configurations need more attention. Maybe the OS environment we use for MySQL setups has never impacted us… Read More »

MySQL 3.20 to 4.0 In the good old days, when 32MB of RAM justified the name my-huge.cnf, when nobody knew Google and Facebook didn’t even exist, security was… how do I put it… kind of cute. Computer viruses didn’t steal millions and didn’t disrupt elections — they played Yankee Doodle or told you not to […]

The post Who are you? The history of MySQL and MariaDB authentication protocols from 1997 to 2017 appeared first on MariaDB.org.

In my previous blogs I told you to enable SSL/TLS and force the connection to be secured. So I followed my advice and did forced SSL. Great!

So now everything is 100% secure isn't it?

No it isn't and I would never claim anything to be 100% secure.

There are important differences in the SSL/TLS implementations of browers and the implementation in MySQL. One of these differences is that your browser has a trust store with a large set of trusted certificate authorities. If the website you visit has SSL enabled then your browser will check if the certificate it presents is signed by a trusted CA. MySQL doesn't use a list of trusted CA's, and this makes sense for many setups.

The key difference is that a website has clients (browsers) which are not managed by the same organization. And for MySQL connections the set of clients is often much smaller are more or less managed by one organization. Adding a CA for a set of …

One of the services our database engineers provide is adding users to MySQL. We have some nice Chef recipes, so all I have to do is update a few files, including adding in the MySQL password hash.

Now, when I added myself, I just logged into MySQL and generated a password hash. But when my SRE (systems reliability engineer) colleague needed to generate a password, he did not have a MySQL system he could login to.

The good news is it’s easy to generate a MySQL password hash. The MySQL password hash is simply a SHA1 hash of a SHA1 hash, with * at the beginning. Which means you do not need a MySQL database to create a MySQL password hash – all you need is a programming language that has a SHA1 function (well, and a concatenate function).

And I found it, of course, on this post at StackExchange (http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/234592/217471). So you don’t have to click through, here is what it says – and I have …