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I'm trying to get my head around the use of SSL with MySQL replication. I've spent all day reading blog posts / articles about this, and I'm still no closer to getting an answer to this question:

Essentially I'm trying to understand the relationship between the ca, client & server files.

In my fictional setup I have:

1 x Master DB - Main Site
5 x Slave DBs - Main Site
Each Slave DB connects to a Slave DB on a remote (all different) Customer Site.

Am I right in thinking therefore that I would:

  1. generate the ca-cert.pem and ca-key.pem files on the Master DB
  2. create a set of client-xxx and server-xxx files on each Slave DB (and a copy of the ca-xxx.pem files)
  3. Onto each Customer DB I would copy the ca-cert.pem,client-cert.pem,client-key.pem from the matching Slave DB

If one of the customer DB's was compromised would I need to generate a new ca-cert.pem file on the master, and re-distribute it to all remaining slaves & customer DB's (requiring all my DB's to be restarted). Or could I just delete the server-cert.pem file from that one slave server?

(obviously I could revoke the username/password - but I'm trying to understand the SSL side at present).

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2 Answers 2

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Create the server and client cert/key files on the master server and then copy only the client cert/key files to each slave server and configure SSL replication. So basically you have the same client cert and key on all slave servers. If a slave gets compromised change the replication user's credentials.

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  • But surely if I rely on the MySQL user credentials, then there is no need for the Client cert/key files. I can use the ca-cert file to encrypt the data. My understanding was the client files would become unique to that client/server pair. And then I could simply revoke those files to prevent a connection, Thus providing an additional layer of security over and above just relying on the MySQL user credentials.
    – IGGt
    Commented Jul 25, 2016 at 9:20
  • IMHO, The point of having SSL replication is to encrypt the replicated data on-the-wire. if you are worried about your servers getting compromised then You should make sure that appropriate safeguards are inplace to prevent it. Put your db servers behind a firewall or a vpn where you can revoke access individually.
    – jerichorivera
    Commented Jul 25, 2016 at 10:14
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The SSL keys are good for encrypting the transmission only - the data stored on the slaves, once transmitted, will be unencrypted. So, if a slave is compromised, the data will be compromised. It doesnt make any sense, as far as I understand, to protect the transmission key, if somebody will already have the entire data.

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  • ok, but if customer1 is compromised, could they not 'potentially' use that key to try and access the other slave databases (assuming the rest of my security was quite lax)?
    – IGGt
    Commented Oct 14, 2016 at 7:59

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