In this blog post, we review some of the important aspects of configuring and managing SSL in MySQL hosting. These would include the default configuration, disabling SSL, and enabling and enforcing SSL on a MySQL server. Our observations are based on the community version of MySQL 5.7.21.

Default SSL Configuration in MySQL

By default, MySQL server always installs and enables SSL configuration. However, it is not enforced that clients connect using SSL. Clients can choose to connect with or without SSL as the server allows both types of connections. Let’s see how to verify this default behavior of MySQL server.

When SSL is installed and enabled on MySQL server by default, we will typically see the following:

1. Presence of *.pem files in the MySQL data directory. These are the various client and server certificates and keys that are in …

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 …

Managing SSL certificates for MySQL can be somewhat of a pain, especially when setting it up on multiple machines.

I looked around on the web, and didn’t really run into any mentions of how to do this for multiple machines, so I dug into it a bit more.

If you’ve created the certificates before, you’ll know you get prompted for various bits of information during a couple of the steps (country, state, email).

However, this can be by-passed by using the -batch option with the openssl command.

So, to set this up for multiple servers, just loop through the following 5 commands for your servers:

cd C:\mysql\certs
openssl genrsa 2048 > ca-key.pem
openssl req -new -x509 -nodes -days 3600 -batch -key ca-key.pem > ca-cert.pem
openssl req -newkey rsa:2048 -days 3600 -batch -nodes -keyout server-key.pem >
        server-req.pem
openssl x509 -req -in server-req.pem -days 3600 -CA ca-cert.pem
        -CAkey …

I often get asked how to set up and use SSL with MySQL, especially on Windows – I think largely because the manual step-by-step is more geared towards Linux users (though this “how-to” is valid for all – anyone can copy/paste the commands after changing the paths).

So I’ve compiled a concise, yet comprehensive, how-to that I wanted to share with everyone out there who wants to set this up quickly and efficiently.

And for those who haven’t done it, setting up SSL can often seem intimidating, so I want to dispell that myth while I’m at it, and show you how quick and easy it can be to set up SSL for MySQL.

For one, I should mention that I’m using a version where SSL is ‘available’, just ‘DISABLED’ (some versions can be compiled w/out ssl support – so those would not work):

mysql> show global …

If you’re using MySQL and SSL, you might want to glance over this article and give your setup a quick test.

I’ve uncovered an alarming bug in 5.5 where one could gain access to your MySQL instance just knowing the username and password (not having any SSL certificate, key, etc.)!

Of course, I’ve filed a bug about it here:

http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=62743

It’s been over 4 days now, and not one comment from the MySQL Bug/Dev Team.

So once again, I feel the need to share this bug with the public, in case you are using SSL with 5.5, and think your connections are secure, or that only users with the certs/key could gain access.

For SSL Users, you’ll already have this set up, but for those who don’t, I’ve simply got mysqld (5.5.15 and 5.5.16 thus far) running with the following options:

ssl-ca      = …