I’m getting more and more concerned about the current Oracle approach to MySQL security. And the fact that I was solely responsible for the security@mysql.com for about ten years, doesn’t make it easier, on the contrary, it only emphasizes changes in the attitude.

Starting from the obvious — somewhat slower response to critical bug fixes, which can be expected, Oracle is a big company, right? Very little information about security vulnerabilities is disclosed, CPUs are carefully stripped from anything that might help to understand the problem, it takes hours to map them to code changes. Heck, even test cases are kept private now. This seriously smells …

What happens when you use the PASSWORD() function to insert a password hash into a table?

• The hash will be written to the table
• The password might be written in clear text to the binlog
• The password might be written in clear text to the general log
• The password might be written in clear text to the slow query log

The query

mysql [localhost] {msandbox} (test) > INSERT INTO testpwd(pwd) VALUES(PASSWORD('secret_password'));
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)

The General log

130128 16:04:41     1 Query     INSERT INTO testpwd(pwd) VALUES(PASSWORD('secret_password'))

The Slow query log

# Time: 130128 16:04:41
# User@Host: msandbox[msandbox] @ localhost []
# Query_time: 0.004887  Lock_time: 0.001043 Rows_sent: 0  Rows_examined: 0
SET …

CSO Online writes about a rather sad list of security breaches at http://www.csoonline.com/article/721151/fatal-half-measures-in-incident-response, and the half-hearted approach companies take in dealing with the security on their networks and websites.

What I find most embarrassing is that it appears (judging by the actions) that many companies have their lawyers do some kind of borked risk assessment , and decide that they can just leave things as-is and yell foul when there’s a breach. After all, particularly in the US prosecutors are very heavy handed with breaches, even when the company has been totally negligent. That’s weird, because an insurance company wouldn’t pay out for a break-in when you’ve left your front door wide open! The problem is of course that the damage will have been done, …

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I have been preaching since 2003 that the default deployment of MySQL (where root can access without password) should be changed to something more sicure.

Yet, MySQL 5.6 still uses the same defaults.

$ mysql --no-defaults -u root --port=5000 -h 127.0.0.1
Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 1
Server version: 5.6.9-rc MySQL Community Server (GPL)

Copyright (c) 2000, 2012, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its
affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective
owners.

Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the current input statement.

mysql> set password=password('oh-come-on');
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> exit
Bye

I have installed MySQL 5.6. Now I access as …

When the MySQL version from your distribution isn't good enough you need to download the latest Oracle MySQL. There are more possibilities like Percona Server and MariaDB, but that's not what this post is about.

The dowload site for MySQL is https://www.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/ and contains to a mirror.php script which ask you if you like to login with a Oracle Web Account and then chooses a mirror for you. You don't have to login. Then you will be redirected to the chosen mirror. In my case this is https://cdn.mysql.com

Firefox will give you a "This Connection is Untrusted" dialog. If you click on "Technical details" it will show the following error:

cdn.mysql.com uses an invalid security certificate.

The certificate is only valid for the following names:
  a248.e.akamai.net , *.akamaihd.net , …

Important Security Fix for a Buffer Overflow Bug: MariaDB 5.5.28a, 5.3.11, 5.2.13 and 5.1.66 include a fix for CVE-2012-5579, a vulnerability that allowed an authenticated user to crash MariaDB server or to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the mysqld process. This is a serious security issue. We recommend upgrading from older versions as soon as possible.

MariaDB 5.5.28a, 5.3.11, 5.2.13 and 5.1.66 (GA) binaries, packages, and source tarballs are now available for download from http://downloads.mariadb.org. So you can upgrade within your own major series.

Note that while this fix has just been published, some other vulnerabilities have been noted over the weekend also. Below a summary of these other CVEs as documented by Red Hat Security Response Team, with annotations by Sergei Gulubchik who is the Security Coordinator for MariaDB.

• …

SANS ISC reported a number of zeroday's for MySQL today.

* CVE-2012-5611 MySQL (Linux) Stack based buffer overrun PoC Zeroday
http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2012/Dec/4
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=882599

* CVE-2012-5612 MySQL (Linux) Heap Based Overrun PoC Zeroday
http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2012/Dec/5
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=882600

* CVE-2012-5613 MySQL (Linux) Database Privilege Elevation Zeroday
Exploit
 …

I previously published stored programs to help implement a (more) comprehensive password policy in MySQL 5.6, building on the password complexity plugin now available in MySQL 5.6.  This proof-of-concept has been expanded recently, and the updated package is available here.  There’s a few notable changes to the earlier version:

Moved all created objects out of mysql system database

The mysql database is meant for system tables, and I try to keep everything not directly managed by the MySQL server out of that database.  The initial proof-of-concept implementation violated this principal – the update corrects this by creating and using a new password_policy database …

I’ve been looking at the new ALTER USER … PASSWORD EXPIRE command as I try to implement a comprehensive password policy for MySQL 5.6.  There’s a few aspects of this feature that I found interesting, and thought others might benefit from what I’ve learned.  Here’s a quick summary:

You can use ALTER USER … PASSWORD EXPIRE in prepared statements as of 5.6.8-rc

This is important because there’s no other way to dynamically bind ALTER USER statements to a user name and host, which is necessary if you are trying to automate anything related to password policies.  This wasn’t the case with earlier 5.6 releases, but was fixed in 5.6.8-rc:

mysql> SELECT password_expired
-> FROM mysql.user
-> WHERE user = 'root' AND host = 'localhost';
+------------------+
| password_expired |
+------------------+
| N                |
+------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> SET @sql = 'ALTER USER …