Last week, a SSL connection security vulnerability was reported for MySQL and MariaDB. The vulnerability states that since MariaDB and MySQL do not enforce SSL when SSL support is enabled, it’s possible to launch Man In The Middle attacks (MITM). MITM attacks can capture the secure connection and turn it into an insecure one, revealing data going back and forth to the server.

Issue resolution in MariaDB is visible through the corresponding ticket in MariaDB’s tracking system (JIRA): https://mariadb.atlassian.net/browse/MDEV-7937

The vulnerability affects the client library of the database server in both MariaDB and MySQL. But, the vulnerability does not affect all the libraries, drivers or connectors for establishing SSL connections with the server.

The vulnerability exists when the connection to the server is done through the client library libmysqlclient. This client library is provided with the database server and is a fork of the corresponding client library in MySQL. The client library is used by probably the most used tool, the MySQL Command-Line tool of which a forked version is shipped with MariaDB.

In addition to libmysqlclient, the MariaDB project provides the following connectors: