MySQL connection using SSL… or not ?

February 23, 2016
Author
Frederic Descamps
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MySQL connection using SSLIn this blog post, we’ll determine a MySQL connection using SSL… or not.

Since MySQL 5.7.5 the server generates SSL certificates (see auto_generate_certs) by default if compiled with SSL, or uses mysql_ssl_rsa_setup if compiled with YaSSL.

But how can we check to see if our MySQL client connection uses SSL?

When using an interactive client, it’s easy! You have two options:

1. Check the status(s):

As you can see, for that connection, we are indeed using SSL: SSL: Cipher in use is DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA

2. Use the status variables Ssl_version  and Ssl_cipher:

But is there a way to verify this on all the connections? For example, if we have some applications connected to our database server, how do we verify which connections are using SSL and which are not?

Yes, there is a solution: Performance_Schema!

This is how:

That’s it. Isn’t that easy? 😉

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