5.8.7.1. Basic SSL Concepts
To understand how MySQL uses SSL, it is necessary to explain
some basic SSL and X509 concepts. People who are familiar with
these can skip this part of the discussion.
By default, MySQL uses unencrypted connections between the
client and the server. This means that someone with access to
the network could watch all your traffic and look at the data
being sent or received. They could even change the data while
it is in transit between client and server. To improve
security a little, you can compress client/server traffic by
using the --compress option when invoking
client programs. However, this does not foil a determined
attacker.
When you need to move information over a network in a secure
fashion, an unencrypted connection is unacceptable. Encryption
is the way to make any kind of data unreadable. In fact,
today's practice requires many additional security elements
from encryption algorithms. They should resist many kind of
known attacks such as changing the order of encrypted messages
or replaying data twice.
SSL is a protocol that uses different encryption algorithms to
ensure that data received over a public network can be
trusted. It has mechanisms to detect any data change, loss, or
replay. SSL also incorporates algorithms that provide identity
verification using the X509 standard.
X509 makes it possible to identify someone on the Internet. It
is most commonly used in e-commerce applications. In basic
terms, there should be some company called a
“Certificate Authority” (or CA) that assigns
electronic certificates to anyone who needs them. Certificates
rely on asymmetric encryption algorithms that have two
encryption keys (a public key and a secret key). A certificate
owner can show the certificate to another party as proof of
identity. A certificate consists of its owner's public key.
Any data encrypted with this public key can be decrypted only
using the corresponding secret key, which is held by the owner
of the certificate.
If you need more information about SSL, X509, or encryption,
use your favorite Internet search engine to search for the
keywords in which you are interested.
