When MySQL client connects to the server it uses one of the authentication plugins. On the server-side, plugins are located in the directory, specified by the option plugin-dir that defaults to

BASEDIR/lib/plugin

  where

BASEDIR

  is the base directory of your MySQL installation. This perfectly works whenever you install MySQL using package manager, or from the Linux tarball.

However, authentication plugins should be also loaded on the client-side. If you installed MySQL into the custom location, you may end up with an error when trying to connect using any plugin requiring a separate client library.

For example, let’s set the …

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 …

MariaDB Server 10.4 came with a whole lot of Security related changes. Some of them are merely optimizations (like MDEV-15649), some improve existing features to be more robust (MDEV-15473, MDEV-7598) or convenient (MDEV-12835, MDEV-16266). Some are MySQL compatibility features, requested by our users (MDEV-7597, MDEV-13095). But the first thing any MariaDB Server user, whether an […]

The post Authentication in MariaDB 10.4 — Understanding the Changes appeared first on MariaDB.org.

Please join Percona’s Chief Evangelist Colin Charles on Thursday, June 28th, 2018, as he presents Securing Database Servers From External attacks at 7:00 AM PDT (UTC-7) / 10:00 AM EDT (UTC-4).

Register Now

A critical piece of your infrastructure is the database tier, yet people don’t pay enough attention to it judging by how many are bitten via poorly chosen defaults, or just a lack understanding of running a secure database tier. In this talk, I’ll focus on MySQL/MariaDB, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB, and cover external authentication, auditing, encryption, SSL, firewalls, replication, and more gems from over a decade of consulting in this space from Percona’s 4,000+ …

Starting with MySQL 8.0.4, we are changing the default authentication plugin for MySQL server from mysql_native_password to caching_sha2_password. Correspondingly, libmysqlclient will now use caching_sha2_password as the default authentication mechanism, too.

Why did we do it?

The advantage of mysql_native_password is that it support challenge-response mechanism which is very quick and does not require encrypted connection.…

MySQL 3.20 to 4.0 In the good old days, when 32MB of RAM justified the name my-huge.cnf, when nobody knew Google and Facebook didn’t even exist, security was… how do I put it… kind of cute. Computer viruses didn’t steal millions and didn’t disrupt elections — they played Yankee Doodle or told you not to […]

The post Who are you? The history of MySQL and MariaDB authentication protocols from 1997 to 2017 appeared first on MariaDB.org.

Please join Sveta Smirnova, Percona’s Principal Technical Services Engineer, as she presents Troubleshooting MySQL Access Privileges Issues on
February 23, 2017 at 11:00 am PST / 2:00 pm EST (UTC-8).

Do you have registered users who can’t connect to the MySQL server? Strangers modifying data to which they shouldn’t have access?

MySQL supports a rich set of user privilege options and allows you to fine tune access to every object in the server. The latest versions support authentication plugins that help to create more access patterns.

However, finding errors in …

I was surprised to find on one of my websites the message “Connect failed: Your password has expired. To log in you must change it using a client that supports expired passwords.

Not knowing that I was using a MySQL password expiry policy I reviewed the 5.7 documentation quickly which *clearly* states “The default default_password_lifetime value is 0, which disables automatic password expiration.”.

I then proceeded to investigate further, my steps are below the following comment.

However, it is always important with MySQL documentation and a new feature (in this case a 5.7 feature) to review release notes when installing versions or to least read ALL the documentation, because you may miss important information, such as.

…

Transport Layer Security (TLS, also often referred to as SSL) is an important component of a secure MySQL deployment, but the complexities of properly generating the necessary key material and configuring the server dissuaded many users from completing this task.  MySQL Server 5.7 simplifies this task for both Enterprise and Community users.  Previous blog posts have detailed the changes supporting Enterprise builds; this blog post will focus on parallel improvements made to MySQL Community builds.

Introducing …

Recent changes to support better security by increasing strength of Diffie-Hellman cipher suites from 512-bit to 2048-bit were introduced to MySQL Server 5.7. While this change enhances security, it is an aggressive change in that 2048-bit DH ciphers are not universally supported. This has become a problem specifically for Java users, as only Java 8 JRE (currently) supports DH ciphers greater than 1024 bits. Making the problem more acute, this change was back-ported from MySQL Server 5.7 to the recent 5.6.26 and 5.5.45 releases in response to a community bug report. This blog post will identify affected applications, existing workarounds, and our plans to provide a more …