Upstream MySQL published an out-of-schedule release this week with two high-severity CVE fixes. If you’re running Percona Server for MySQL 5.7 or 8.0 under Extended Lifecycle Support (ELS), the program we previously called Post EOL Support, you don’t have to do anything to qualify for them. We’ve already applied the fixes and re-released the affected ELS builds.

This is the point of ELS. When a major version reaches End of Life (EOL), the community stops shipping patches, but the databases running on it don’t stop mattering. ELS keeps critical bug and security fixes coming for versions that are past their EOL date, so you can stay on 5.7 or 8.0 on your own timeline instead of a deadline someone else set.

What we did

These CVE fixes landed upstream outside the normal cadence. Under ELS, customers are entitled to security fixes for the versions they run, so we pulled the patches into the 5.7 and 8.0 builds and …

Background # A critical vulnerability CVE-2021-44228 in the Apache Log4j logging library was disclosed on Dec 9. The project provided release 2.15.0 with a patch that mitigates the impact of this CVE. It was quickly found that the initial patch was insufficient, and an additional CVE CVE-2021-45046 followed. This has been fixed in release 2.16.0. Who is affected? # The bulk of vitess code is in golang, and is unaffected by these vulnerabilities.

Last  week, a SSL connection security vulnerability was reported for MySQL and MariaDB. The vulnerability states that since MariaDB and MySQL do not enforce SSL when SSL support is enabled, it’s possible to launch Man In The Middle attacks (MITM). MITM attacks can capture the secure connection and turn it into an insecure one, revealing data going back and forth to the server.

Issue resolution in MariaDB is visible through the corresponding ticket in MariaDB’s tracking system (JIRA): https://mariadb.atlassian.net/browse/MDEV-7937

The vulnerability affects the client library of the database server in both MariaDB and MySQL. But, the vulnerability does not affect all the libraries, drivers or connectors for establishing SSL connections with the server.

The vulnerability exists when the connection to the server is done through the client …

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.

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