Join Percona’s Chief Evangelist, Colin Charles as he presents Securing Your MySQL/MariaDB Data on Tuesday, July 11, 2017 at 7:00 am PDT / 10:00 am EDT (UTC-7).

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This webinar will discuss the features of MySQL/MariaDB that when enabled and used improve the default usage of MySQL. Many cloud-based applications fail to:

• Use appropriate filesystem permissions
• Employ TLS/SSL for connections
• Require TLS/SSL with MySQL replication
• Use external authentication plugins (LDAP, PAM, Kerberos)
• Encrypt all your data at rest …

Join Percona’s Solutions Engineer, Dimitri Vanoverbeke as he presents Security and Encryption in the MySQL World on Thursday, July 6, 2017, at 7:00 am PDT / 10:00 am EDT (UTC-7).

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MySQL and MariaDB Server provide many new features that help with security and encryption, both of which are extremely important in today’s world. Learn how to use these features, from roles to at-rest-encryption, to increase security. At the end of the webinar, you should understand how to have a securely configured MySQL instance!

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Welcome to Part 2 in a series of blog posts on MySQL encryption at rest. This post covers InnoDB tablespace encryption.

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 covered …

This blog post looks at SSL connections and how they work in MySQL 5.7.

Recently I was working on an SSL implementation with MySQL 5.7, and I made some interesting discoveries. I realized I could connect to the MySQL server without specifying the SSL keys on the client side, and the connection is still secured by SSL. I was confused and I did not understand what was happening.

In this blog post, I am going to show you why SSL works in MySQL 5.7, and it worked previously in MySQL 5.6.

Let’s start with an introduction of how SSL worked in 5.6.

SSL in MySQL 5.6

The documentation for SSL in MySQL 5.6 is quite detailed, and it explains how SSL works. But first let’s make one thing …

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, …

In this blog post, we’ll look at the performance of SST data transfer using encryption.

In my previous post, we reviewed SST data transfer in an unsecured environment. Now let’s take a closer look at a setup with encrypted network connections between the donor and joiner nodes.

The base setup is the same as the previous time:

• Database server: Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.7 on donor node
• Database: sysbench database – 100 tables 4M rows each (total ~122GB)
• Network: donor/joiner hosts are connected with dedicated 10Gbit LAN
• Hardware: donor/joiner hosts – boxes with 28 Cores+HT/RAM 256GB/Samsung SSD 850/Ubuntu 16.04

The setup details for the encryption aspects in our testing:

• Cryptography libraries: openssl-1.0.2, …

TwinDB Backup supports encrypted backup copies since version 2.11.0. As usual the tool supports natively backup and restore operations, if backup copies are encrypted the tool takes care of decryption.

Installing TwinDB Packages repository

I will work with CentOS 7 system to show the example, but there are also packages for Ubuntu trusty and Debian jessie.

We host our packages in PackageCloud which provides a great installation guide if you need to install the repo via puppet, chef etc. The manual way is pretty straightforward as well. A PackageCloud script installs and configures the repository.

curl -s https://packagecloud.io/install/repositories/twindb/main/script.rpm.sh | sudo bash

Installing twindb-backup

Once the repository is ready it’s time to install the tool.

yum install …

Okay, so you’ve read the first post on enabling MariaDB’s data at rest encryption, and now you are ready to create an encrypted table.

And just to get it out of the way for those interested, you can always check your encrypted (and non-encrypted) table stats via:

SELECT * FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.INNODB_TABLESPACES_ENCRYPTION;

ENCRYPTION_SCHEME=1 means the table is encrypted and ENCRYPTION_SCHEME=0 means they are not.

But let’s get into some specific examples.

I find the following 4 tables interesting, as the first 3 essentially all create the same table, and the 4th shows how to create a non-encrypted table once you have encryption enabled.

CREATE TABLE t10 (id int) ENGINE=INNODB;
CREATE TABLE t11 (id int) ENGINE=INNODB ENCRYPTED=YES;
CREATE TABLE t12 (id int) …

Encryption is becoming more and more prevalent and increasingly necessary in today’s world, so I wanted to provide a good overall “getting started” article on using MariaDB’s data at rest encryption (DARE) for anyone out there interested in setting this up in their environment.

MariaDB’s data encryption at rest manual page covers a lot of the specifics, but I wanted to create a quick start guide and also note a few items that might not be immediately obvious.

And due to the number of my examples, I’m splitting this into two posts. The first will focus solely on setting up encryption so you can use it. The second will focus on using it with a number of examples and common use cases.

Also, I feel that I should mention from the outset that, currently, this data at rest encryption only applies to InnoDB/XtraDB tables and Aria …

Encrypt your credentials using GPG

This blog post will look how to use encryption to secure your database credentials.

In the recent blog post Use MySQL Shell Securely from Bash, there are some good examples of how you might avoid using a ~/.my.cnf – but you still need to put that password down on disk in the script. MySQL 5.6.6 and later introduced the  –login-path option, which is a handy way to store per-connection entries and keep the credentials in an encrypted format. This is a great improvement, but as shown in Get MySQL Passwords in Plain Text from .mylogin.cnf, …