Often databases contain data that needs to be proven as valid and authentic. We want to ensure that a known person or other sender (e.g. a trusted app) of the information can’t deny content, nor that the content can change without that person (senders) consent.…

In this first of a series of blog posts, we’ll look at MySQL encryption at rest.

At Percona, we work with a number of clients that require strong security measures for PCI, HIPAA and PHI compliance, where data managed by MySQL needs to be encrypted “at rest.” As with all things open source, there several options for meeting the MySQL encryption at rest requirement. In this three-part series, we cover several popular options of encrypting data and present the various pros and cons to each solution. You may want to evaluate which parts of these tutorials work best for your situation before using them in production.

Part one of this series is implementing disk-level encryption using crypt+LUKS.

In MySQL 5.7, InnoDB has built-in encryption features. This solution has some cons, …

Sharing keys, passphrases with applications is problematic, especially with regard to encrypting data. Too often applications are developed where “the keys are left in the door” or at best “under the mat” – hard coded, in a clear text property file… exposed and vulnerable. …

This quick post demonstrates using Percona Server for MySQL in Docker Swarm with some new authentication provisioning practices.

Some small changes to the startup script for the Percona-Server container image allows us to specify a file that contains password values to set as our root user’s secret. “Why do we need this functionality,” I hear you cry? When we use an environment variable, it’s not terribly hard to locate the value to which someone has set as their database root password. Environment variables are not well suited for sensitive data. We preach against leaving our important passwords in easy to reach places. So moving towards something more secure whilst retaining usability is desirable. …

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 …

We use Percona’s <A HREF=”https://www.percona.com/doc/percona-server/5.5/management/audit_log_plugin.html”>audit log plugin</A> to keep a record of all our logins. Recently we did one of those tasks that everyone knows they should do, but few ever do: change the application user’s password.

When we change the application password, we add a new application user with the proper permissions and a new password, update the information in our repository and wait a while. Using this procedure, any failures mean the old user is used, and more importantly – failure does not impact the end user.

We check the audit logs to see if there were failures – if the user is still being used – when it is no longer in use, we can drop the user.

For reference, here are our settings:

[mysqlaudit]# …

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. …