As you may know, MySQL 5.6 will reach EOL (“End of Life”) in February 2021. This means in about two months, there will be no more updates, and more importantly, no more security fixes for discovered vulnerabilities.     

You may be well ahead of the curve and have already updated to MySQL 5.7 or MySQL 8.0, or even better, migrated to Percona Server for MySQL, or maybe not. Perhaps it takes more time than anticipated to adjust your application to be compatible with MySQL 5.7 or higher, or maybe you planned to decommission your application, but life got in the way. Now the EOL date is looming, and there is just no way to decommission your last MySQL 5.6 instance in time.

We have great news for our MySQL Luddites! Percona is pleased to …

Getting MySQL working with self-signed SSL certificates is pretty simple. Having it working with a certificate signed by a trusted authority is also very simple, we just need to set the correct path and privileges to the file. The problem comes when we need to make MySQL validate the certificate signature against the authority public key.

I’ve searched on the internet but wasn’t able to find much information about it. There are a good number of posts on how to set up your own certificate authority and self-sign your certificates, but not much about how to use one signed by a public trusted authority.

I used a certificate signed by a Let’s Encrypt on my tests but the concepts and steps shared here should work for any public trusted authority. I also generated one certificate to be used by MySQL server and another one to be used by the client. It is possible to use the …

Kata containers are containers that use hardware virtualization technologies for workload isolation almost without performance penalties. Top use cases are untrusted workloads and tenant isolation (for example in a shared Kubernetes cluster). This blog post describes how to run Percona Kubernetes Operator for Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC Operator) using Kata containers.

Prepare Your Kubernetes Cluster

Setting up Kata containers and Kubernetes is well documented in the official github repo (cri-o, …

Codership is pleased to announce a new Generally Available (GA) release of the multi-master Galera Cluster for MySQL 5.6, 5.7 and 8.0, consisting of MySQL-wsrep 5.6.49 (release notes, download), 5.7.31 (release notes, download), and 8.0.21 (release notes, download) with Galera Replication library …

The Challenge Often with sensitive information, you need to have an audit log. Not just that a table had a select run, but that specific cells within the table were accessed.  Frequently data such as this will contain a classification level as part of the row, defining policies for how it is handled, audited, etc.… Facebook Twitter LinkedIn

ProxySQL Firewall Overview

ProxySQL’s flexible query rules engine has many uses, from Read/Write splitting, sharding and even creating firewall blacklist. This allows ProxySQL to be loved by both Performance and Security-minded engineers.

Starting in ProxySQL 2.0.9, ProxySQL has another Security feature: the Firewall Whitelist.

Modeled on MySQL Enterprise Firewall, this allows a security-conscious administrator to tune access to only allow certain queries.

Imagine a situation where your webapp gets hacked, which exposes your user’s database credentials.

If your webapp connects directly to the database, the malicious user can do what they want to your data with the same permissions your webapp has.

So perhaps they can’t just DROP TABLE because you’ve smartly removed DDL permissions …

A long long time ago (in a galaxy far away… cue the music!) MySQL added support for an authentication plugin which is now known as mysql_native_password. The mysql_native_password plugin uses SHA1 hash to

• Store the password(SHA1(SHA1(password)) in mysql.user table
• Authenticate user

One of the good traits of this plugin is that it allows authentication using …

In most cases, MySQL password instructions provide information on changing MySQL user passwords on the production system (e.g., reset root password without restart). It is even recommended to change passwords regularly for security reasons. But still, sometimes DBA duties on legacy systems offer surprises and you need to recover the original password for some old users.

There is no magic: as long as only hashes are stored and not the original passwords, the only way to recover the lost password is to brute force it from the known hash.

Note on Security and mysql-unsha1 Attack

Interestingly, if a hacker has access to password hash and can sniff mysql traffic, he doesn’t need to recover a plain text password from it. It doesn’t matter how strong the password and how strong the hashing …

Day-to-day database operation requires, from an administrator, deep knowledge of db internals and security issues, in particular things like SQL injections. In order to prevent such kind of an attack, we have included go-sql-driver into our code for secure placeholder escaping.

Unfortunately, not all cases are secured by the driver.

In case we are using the standard driver for working with MySQL, if we need to pass a variable to the database query, we use a placeholder “?” in order for the server to understand that it needs to process the incoming variable to avoid injection. It works fine with just regular SELECT/INSERT/UPDATE statements, but, unfortunately, MySQL server is not able to process all types of queries.

For example:

db.Exec("CREATE USER ?@? IDENTIFIED BY ?", name, host, pass)

This query will return an error from the …

In systems nowadays, improving security is a must! One of the weakest links in the security system is the user password from where an attacker can enter. In order to improve password strength and security, MySQL provides a plugin called “Validation plugin” which can be configured to enforce a set of rules for passwords.

Installation

The plugin can be enabled by executing the following at runtime:

INSTALL PLUGIN validate_password SONAME 'validate_password.so';

Or by adding the plugin in the configuration file, but this requires bouncing MySQL for it to take effect:

[mysqld]
plugin-load-add=validate_password.so

It’s also suggested to add the following variable in my.cnf so that the plugin cannot be removed at runtime (also requires a MySQL bounce to take effect):

[mysqld]
validate-password=FORCE_PLUS_PERMANENT

Checking Installation