MySQL, starting from 4.0.2, had AES encryption and decryption functions. They are compiled with support for pure independent block by block encryption mode (ECB), using a 128 bit key.

128 bits is plenty enough! And sufficient for everybody! And who would even want to go to the trouble of dealing with initialization vectors? At least that’s what they probably thought when introducing these functions back in 2002 in MySQL 4.0.2.

But I believe in giving people a choice. Read below on why choice is important.

Does (key) size matter ?

The biggest threat that longer keys protect against is brute force attacks. Fast forward 12 years since the introduction of these great SQL functions.  Brute-forcing shorter keys doesn’t sound as impossible as it previously did. Especially with …

Ah database security… the black sheep of topics and something you would really rather not have to deal with right?

I mean surely all the fanfare and paranoia is reserved for the neck beards with tinfoil hats whom live in their own D.I.Y Faraday cage … that must be it … it just has to be?

No, the hard reality is the world is not rose tinted and “they” are out to get you be it for fun or for profit; from defacements to theft compromising your applications, and more importantly your data is big business. For some these acts are nothing short of sheer entertainment for an otherwise boring evening. (I’ll be speaking about this topic next week in much more detail at the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo in Santa Clara, California. My session, “Security and why you need to review …

Over on the codecentric blog I published an article on SSH Two-Factor Authentication with Duo Security. You are welcome to check it out.

MaxScale is a Proxy for the MySQL protocol built with a modular architecture. The underlying concept of modules allows to extend the MaxScale proxy services. The current version implements Read Write splitting and Connection Load Balancing. Internally MySQL queries go through a SQL parsing phase. This gives MaxScale great capabilities regarding queries routing.

So if [...]

Ever found yourself working on a MySQL server where root’s password is unavailable? It has happened to me a few times, always because the person who set up the DB left the place long ago, and this information was not documented anywhere. If you have root access to the OS, MySQL lets you restart the … Continue reading Recovering MySQL access →

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3. …

Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
Donald Knuth

Bugs in software are a fact of life. MySQL, as part of Oracle, issues of Critical Patch Updates and Security Alerts notices. You may have seen Daniel van Eeden‘s blog on the January announcement.

Daniel’s summary:

For MySQL 5.6 you should upgrade to 5.6.15
For MySQL 5.5 you should upgrade to 5.5.35
For MySQL 5.1 you should upgrade to 5.1.73

But you probably missed the executive summary.

But how do YOU get this information when it become available? …

Oracle has released the Critical Patch Update (CPU) advisory for January 2014.

The affected MySQL products are:

• Oracle MySQL Enterprise Monitor, versions 2.3, 3.0 

• Oracle MySQL Server, versions 5.1, 5.5, 5.6

So this means that you should consider updating MySQL. For MySQL Enterprise the updates should be available on My Oracle Support and for the Community version the new versions are on the regular download locations. I guess the official repositories are already updated.

For MySQL 5.6 you should upgrade to 5.6.15
For MySQL 5.5 you should upgrade to 5.5.35
For MySQL 5.1 you should upgrade to 5.1.73

If you use the MySQL release from your distribution …

This week we talk about how to install and use the MariaDB Audit plugin, and what the audit log looks like. Ear Candy presents a gotcha with MySQL and temporary directories, and At the Movies is about using Dynamo for more than just a data store.

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This is part two on a two-part series on the performance implications of in-flight data encryption with MySQL. In the first part, I focused specifically on the impact of using MySQL’s built-in SSL support with some rather surprising results. Certainly it was expected that query throughput would be lower with SSL than without, but I was rather surprised by the magnitude of the performance hit incurred at connection setup time. These results naturally lended themselves to some further investigation; in particular, I wanted to compare performance differences between MySQL’s built-in SSL encryption facilities and external encryption technologies, such as SSH tunneling. I’ll also be using this post to address a couple of questions posed in the comments on my original article. So, without further ado….

Test Environment

The …

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