Comment 0 for bug 1447527

This morning we received a report from oCERT which is being treated as a public security issue in the MySQL client.

In short it is possible for the MySQL client to silently fall back on a non SSL connection instead of aborting the connection, and as such communication will not be encrypted "in flight", this is known documented behaviour,

This is now being assigned a CVE and an advisory is set for release April 29th, the body of the original notification follows.

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oCERT recently received a report from Adam Goodman, Principal Security
Architect at Duo Security, concerning a security issue on MySQL client code.

This issue affects MariaDB, and very likely Percona. as well and is related
to https://mariadb.atlassian.net/browse/MDEV-7937

The issue concerns the impossibility for MySQL/MariaDB users (with any major
stable version) to enforce an SSL connection without possibility for a MITM
attach to perform a malicious downgrade.

The issue affects MySQL versions before 5.7.3. However, these fixes have not
been back-ported to previous major versions (5.5, 5.6, etc.), and MySQL 5.7
is not yet considered a stable release. Situation should be similar with
MariaDB.

Therefore the vast majority of MySQL/MariaDB users:

a) have no ability to enforce SSL use, except by patching code or
performing a major-version upgrade to a development release, and

b) are probably not aware of this limitation

The following links clearly illustrate the issue:

https://github.com/mysql/mysql-server/commit/3bd5589e1a5a93f9c224badf983cd65c45215390
http://mysqlblog.fivefarmers.com/2014/04/02/redefining-ssl-option/
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/relnotes/mysql/5.7/en/news-5-7-3.html

While technically this is documented behaviour, it represents a pretty bad
one and the feeling is that most users actually have no awareness of this.

Therefore the consensus is to treat this as a vulnerability, a CVE is
currently being assigned, distributions have been pre-notified and we are
going to release an advisory on April 29th at 15:00 CET.

We are also reaching MySQL and MariaDB following the original report from Duo
Security and we are in the process of contacting other MySQL forks.
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