Somebody sends you a link to a Google Sheet and it just works. It’s magical.
But that magic comes at a cost. I see far, far too many organizations that regularly share Google Documents and Sheets by using the share with “Anyone with the link” option that Google easily provides.

That is almost ALWAYS a bad idea. The convenience of having it shared with anybody is, at the same time, a potential security problem today and in the future.

But that long link with the 44 random-looking characters would be impossible for somebody to guess, right?

Yes. It would be statistically improbable for somebody to just guess a random string of 44 characters that would result in an actual document. It is possible that an attacker could write programs that could guess millions and millions of links to try them until they found some documents that actually exist. But that’s not the most likely weakness.

Consider what happens when you email a for your spreadsheet to somebody else. You have zero control over who accesses it after that. What if the recipient forwards your email with the link to somebody else? Often emails to businesses are forwarded into Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or similar systems where that link is now accessible to many other people in the organization. What if an attacker has access to a recipients email? Or a CRM system? How about if an employee leaves the company and they still have it in a browser history.

In all of those scenarios, and hundreds more that you can’t imagine, if your document is shared with “Anyone with the link”, literally anybody that sees that link can open it and you have absolutely no knowledge that they did.

Always share only with specific email addresses.

Sharing with Google Groups

Sharing with specific people can become a headache to maintain as people change roles. Consider using the Google Groups feature in your organization. You can set up a Google Group for something like ‘client-yourclientname@myorganziation.com’ or ‘team-myteamname@myorganization.com’ and ask to have documents shared with that group instead of individual people. You can then add and remove people from the groups to provide access to only those that are allowed.

See More information about sharing with Groups at https://support.google.com/a/users/answer/9308872?hl=en

There are many articles around the Internet that discuss enabling Encryption in-transit to MySQL servers. They all include instructions about creating Client Certificates, but they don’t clearly explain that Client-Side Certificates are not a requirement to achieve end-to-end encryption between client and server.

Creating Client certificates that can be authenticated by the server can be complicated. It is not even possible in some scenarios, such as using servers hosted by AWS RDS, since AWS runs its own Certificate Authority. But don’t let that stop you. Below, I will demonstrate that enabling SSL/TLS on the server, and using a client that supports encryption is sufficient to securely encrypt traffic between the two.

First, I set up a MySQL server on RDS using MySQL version 8.0.25. Nothing special here, except that I’m going to make it “Publicly Accessible” which gives is a Public IP Address so that I can access it over the Internet. My Security Group here already allows inbound port 3307 from my desired IP Addresses for testing:

aws rds create-db-instance \
    --db-instance-identifier=encryption-tester \
    --allocated-storage=20 \
    --db-instance-class=db.t3.micro \
    --engine=mysql \
    --master-username=admin \
    --master-user-password="thepasswordIchose" \
    --vpc-security-group-ids="sg-0bf6fa7080100e55b" \
    --backup-retention-period=0 \
    --port=3307 \
    --no-multi-az \
    --engine-version=8.0.25 \
    --publicly-accessible

It takes several minutes for my Database Instance to be created, then I can log into it with the command:

mysql -h encryption-tester.accountidstuff.us-east-1.rds.amazonaws.com -u admin --port=3307 -p

I run the command show status like 'ssl_cipher'; and look at that! My connection is encrypted already, as indicated by Cipher method present:

$ mysql -h encryption-tester.accountidstuff.us-east-1.rds.amazonaws.com -u admin --port=3307 -p
Enter password:
Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 17
Server version: 8.0.25 Source distribution

Copyright (c) 2000, 2021, Oracle and/or its affiliates.

Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its
affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective
owners.

Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the current input statement.

mysql> show status like 'ssl_cipher';
+---------------+-----------------------------+
| Variable_name | Value                       |
+---------------+-----------------------------+
| Ssl_cipher    | ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256 |
+---------------+-----------------------------+
1 row in set (0.01 sec)

I haven’t set up any client certificates or anything special, yet my connection is encrypted. But let’s not take the session variable’s word for it. Lets double-check by capturing and inspecting some packets.

I’ll run tcpdump with this command:

sudo tcpdump -i any host encryption-tester.accountidstuff.us-east-1.rds.amazonaws.com  -s 65535 -w /tmp/initial-connection.pcap

To make it quick, Instead of using a full packet-analysis program, I just run the strings command to look for text strings in the packet capture:

17:05 $ strings -8  /tmp/initial-connection.pcap
=JpgP~eS
mysql_native_password
Washington1
Seattle1"0
Amazon Web Services, Inc.1
Amazon RDS1%0#
Amazon RDS us-east-1 2019 CA0
210824170035Z
240822170850Z0
:encryption-tester.accountidstuff.us-east-1.rds.amazonaws.com1
Amazon.com1
Seattle1
Washington1
Seattle1
Washington1"0
Amazon Web Services, Inc.1
Amazon RDS1 0
Amazon RDS Root 2019 CA
:encryption-tester.accountidstuff.us-east-1.rds.amazonaws.com0
Seattle1
Washington1"0
Amazon Web Services, Inc.1
Amazon RDS1 0
Amazon RDS Root 2019 CA0
190919181653Z
240822170850Z0
Washington1
Seattle1"0
Amazon Web Services, Inc.1
Amazon RDS1%0#
Amazon RDS us-east-1 2019 CA0
HId0%aC>

Looks like a lot of stuff in that output about the certificate and SSL negotiation, but nothing containing the queries I executed.

I’m going to try it again and specifically disable encryption to see what the packets look like and ensure they contain the plain-text statements and responses I expect:

This is my SQL session:

17:05 $ mysql --ssl-mode=DISABLED -h encryption-tester.accountidstuff.us-east-1.rds.amazonaws.com -u admin --port=3307 -p
Enter password:
Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 32
Server version: 8.0.25 Source distribution

Copyright (c) 2000, 2021, Oracle and/or its affiliates.

Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its
affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective
owners.

Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the current input statement.

mysql> select version();
+-----------+
| version() |
+-----------+
| 8.0.25    |
+-----------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> show status like 'ssl_cipher';
+---------------+-------+
| Variable_name | Value |
+---------------+-------+
| Ssl_cipher    |       |
+---------------+-------+
1 row in set (0.01 sec)

mysql> \q

The strings in the packets captured during that session clearly contain things relevant to the commands that I executed:

17:05 $ strings -5 /tmp/skip-ssl.pcap
1%aCu
1%a\u
8.0.25
*Bi|tm
UkU-dsK
mysql_native_password
admin
mysql_native_password
Linux
_client_name
libmysql
24817
_client_version
5.7.35  _platform
x86_64
program_name
mysql
select @@version_comment limit 1
@@version_comment
Source distribution
select version()
        version()
8.0.25
show status like 'ssl_cipher'
performance_schema
session_status
session_status
Variable_name
Variable_name
performance_schema
session_status
session_status
Value
Value
Ssl_cipher

Conclusion:

SSL Client-Certificates are NOT required for traffic to be encrypted to a MySQL server. In fact, with a modern client and server, SSL is preferred and is automatically enabled. Just like I’d expect for traffic to be encrypted by default in 2021.

So what is the purpose of Client Certificates during a MySQL Connection

Client Certificates are intended to verify the identity of the Client. They are an extra step of authentication beyond a typical username and password. By presenting a client certificate that has been properly signed by a recognized Certificate Authority, the client is proving that their identity or system has been verified by the Certificate Authority.

Because SSL is complicated and is not well understood, many well-meaning people have instructions for creating a client key and client certificate, and transmitting those to authorized users. While that does provide a second piece of information needed to authenticate to the server, it is not how a secure client should authenticate.

The proper, fully secure method for a client to get a certificate is for the client to create its own private key. It should never share that key, even with the Certificate Authority. With the private key created, it would then create a certificate signing request (CSR), and present only the certificate signing request to the Certificate Authority. The certificate authority takes whatever steps it requires to verify the authenticity of the client, then provide the client back with a Client Certificate signed by the Certificate Authority. That Client Certificate is the client’s evidence that it’s identity has been verified by the Certificate Authority. The Certificate Authority is able to provide the client certificate without ever having the client’s private key.

Best Practices

If you run a MySQL Server and want to require that all clients to connect via SSL/TLS, you can set the global setting require_secure_transport to true. To require SSL only for specific users, use the CREATE USER ... REQUIRE SSL statement when creating the MySQL user

Several posts around the Internet describe how to use a specific SSH Identity composer packages, but I can never find them when needed.

This is how I use a specific SSH identity file for packages deployed with GitHub via Deploy keys. GitHub allows a deploy key to be used with only a single repository, so if you have multiple repositories, you need a separate SSH key for each.

Create the SSH Key

ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -f ~/.ssh/repo-foobar -N '' -C "foobar-deploy"

Copy the contents of ~/.ssh/repo-foobar.pub into the “Deploy Key” section of the Repository settings in GitHub.

Now, you can script a deploy, including a composer install that includes that repository with the command

Use a custom GIT_SSH_COMMAND during composer install

cd /path/to/codebase
export GIT_SSH_COMMAND="ssh -i /home/username/.ssh/repo-foobar -o 'IdentitiesOnly yes '"
COMPOSER_HOME="/home/username/" composer install


The composer_install command uses the defined SSH command (instead of just plain ssh). In doing so, it uses the identity only from the specified key.

Have multiple repos included in your composer.json file that each need a separate identity?

You’ll need to create the SSH key and upload a separate key to GitHub for each repo. However, you can only specify one SSH key to use during the composer install. While there are more elegant solutions, I’ve found the simplest is just to run composer install multiple times, one for each package, and change the identity file between each one. The first execution will fail, but will keep the downloaded code in the composer cache. The second one won’t need to re-download the first again since it is already in the cache, and if you with as many packages as you have, it will eventually succeed, having downloaded each of them.

I’ve started tinkering with Bitcoin Mining. Power usage is the single largest cost, so you need ensure that you are using the absolute least expensive power in order to generate as much profit as possible. I live in Georgia and subscribe to Georgia Power’s ‘Smart Usage’ program, which has lower costs most of the time, but peak periods which are Mondays-Fridays in June-September between 2pm and 7pm have a much higher power cost. My full calculation puts the non-peak price per kWh at about $0.048 and peak prices at about three times higher at $0.151 per kWh. Mining bitcoin on an Antminer S9 is mildly profitable at the non-peak price, but definitely loses money at the peak price.

Since it runs on a 220v plug, I can’t use something off-the-shelf like a smart plug to turn it on and off. I’m a linux geek anyway and would rather do it with software. The Antminer has a very bare-bones Linux OS, but it fortunately has crond installed, even though it is not running. These steps will enable crond and create a cron job that kills the bmminer process during the peak hours. It then reboots when the peak period is ending and starts everything back up.

Note that the machine is still on with fans running. It just doesn’t run the mining process which consumes all of the power.

You can see my power usage in the chart below, showing that power usage dropped significantly during the time from 2pm-7pm.

Here is how to make it work:

1. SSH into the Antminer. Default user is root, password of admin
ssh root@192.168.1.200
2. Have it start cron at boot by adding this line to the bottom of /etc/inittab:
   echo "cron:2345:once:/usr/sbin/crond" >> /etc/inittab
3. mkdir /var/spool/cron/crontabs
4. Run crontab -e to edit the root crontab in vi
5. Paste in this content, modify for your desired time times. Note that times are in Universal Coordinated Time (UTC)

6. ## Here we will stop `single-board-test` and `bmminer` from running during "Peak" periods for Georgia Power
   ## when it is unprofitable to mine due to increase in power cost
   ## 'Peak' is defined as 2pm-7pm, Monday-Friday, in June-September
   
   ## Since monitorcg is started from inittab and can't effectively be killed, we kill single-board-test and bmminer every minute
   ## during the peak hours
   
   ## kill `single-board-test`, which monitors and restarts `bmminer`
   * 18-22 * 6-9 1-5  /bin/kill `/bin/ps -ef | /bin/grep single-board | /bin/grep -v grep | /usr/bin/head -n1 | /usr/bin/cut -c1-5`
   
   ## Also, obviously kill `bmminer`
   * 18-22 * 6-9 1-5 /bin/kill `/bin/ps -ef | /bin/grep bmminer       | /bin/grep -v grep | /usr/bin/head -n1 | /usr/bin/cut -c1-5`
   
   
   ## Reboot at 6:59pm EDT, which will restart the whole machine, bmminer with it (and takes a few minutes to start back up)
   59 22 * 6-9 1-5 /sbin/reboot
   

7. Exit vi with saving by typing<ESC> :wq<ENTER>
8. Finally, just type reboot at the command line to have the machine restart.

For a long time, I’ve never been able to answer some basic questions that I thought fundamental to optimizing server performance. MySQL gives you some server-wide metrics about activity, but none of it is broken down per-table so that an application developer could look into where to reduce the number of writes, or generally where to focus their attention in order to improve the server performance.

I finally got ambitious enough to tackle this problem and asked a question on StackOverflow at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/39459185/mysql-how-to-count-the-number-of-inserts-updates-to-a-table

A commenter named barat pointed me to this post which had the insightful idea of parsing the binary log for analysis.
Since my servers are generally hosted on AWS, I don’t have direct access to the binary log, so I had to retrieve those. The MySQL documentation for the mysqlbinlog command briefly mentions how to read the binary log from a remote server. It took some experimentation to get the right command and output options with all of the data I wanted. Specifically, the `–base64-output=DECODE-ROWS –verbose` options which translate some of the row-based logging into MySQL commands that can be parsed.

The first step is to create a user that has access to the binary logs. I used the main ‘admin’ user that RDS creates because it was convenient. If creating a new user, you probably need to grant the REPLICATION_SLAVE privilege.

You can see which binary logs are available on the server with the SHOW BINARY LOGS; command:

mysql> show binary logs;
+----------------------------+-----------+
| Log_name                   | File_size |
+----------------------------+-----------+
| mysql-bin-changelog.232522 | 16943219  |
| mysql-bin-changelog.232523 | 32300889  |
| mysql-bin-changelog.232524 | 15470603  |
+----------------------------+-----------+

Then you can actually retrieve the log and print to STDOUT using this command:

14:01 $ mysqlbinlog --read-from-remote-server \
  --host myhost.somerandomchars.us-east-1.rds.amazonaws.com \
  --user admin \
  --password="mypassword"
  mysql-bin-changelog.232522

Note that if you get the error below, you need to make sure that your MySQL client and server tools are using the same version. I originally attempted to use MySQL 5.5 tools with a MySQL 5.6 server.

ERROR: Got error reading packet from server: Slave can not handle replication events with
the checksum that master is configured to log; the first event 'mysql-bin-changelog.232519'
at 4, the last event read from '/rdsdbdata/log/binlog/mysql-bin-changelog.232519' at 120,
the last byte read from '/rdsdbdata/log/binlog/mysql-bin-changelog.232519' at 120.

After that, it was just a matter of parsing the file for the relevant commands. I’ve put all of that logic now into a quick PHP script that I can reuse anywhere. Now, I can go through a bunch of binary logs on a server and see which tables are updated the most frequently with output like this:

Parsed 1,096,063 lines spanning 300 seconds between 2016-09-13 03:05:00 and 2016-09-13 03:10:00
master                         metrics                        update          = 43570
master                         metrics                        insert into     = 9
DEFAULT                        accounts                       update          = 501
DEFAULT                        users                          update          = 5
DEFAULT                        logins                         insert into     = 1
mysql                          rds_heartbeat2                 insert into     = 1

I’ve committed this project to Github at https://github.com/sellerlabs/mysql-writes-per-table for others to use.

After struggling with this problem in my mind for a while, I finally had the opportunity to experiment with Cloud Init and come up with a working solution for securely (I think) deploying code and credentials to a stock Ubuntu Instance on EC2.

My primary goals are:

• Must use an stock AMI with no customization
• Human readable user-data that contains appName, environment, and role.
• user-data must be easily modified by a developer for their own app or environment
  (No forcing them to base64 encode, gzip, or use special tools)
• Must be portable between providers.
  The example works with EC2, but initial ‘include’ file can be customized for each provider or OS.

The diagram below shows how this is to be accomplished

I’ve successfully deployed several instances using this method and it seems to work well. Getting the cloud init include file, and the script

I spent the last several hours troubleshooting any annoying error with the mongodb init script on Ubuntu. The script would start the daemon easy enough, but would report a failure. When subsequently trying to stop the daemon, it would then then say it was successful, but in-fact, still be running.

Fortunately, I found that somebody else had already reported the bug, but the comments pointing developers to the wrong place – looking inside the mongod code instead of in the init script.

After digging in to it for longer than I’d like to have spent, I found the cause was the –make-pidfile option being used in the init script.

My understanding of this process is that the start-stop-daemon command was creating the pidfile (as root), before spawning the actual mongod process (as the mongodb user). mongod in some cases (at least when not configsvr=true) must fork again before saving its own pidfile. Since the file created by start-stop-daemon is being run as root, the less-privileged mongodb user can not overwrite it (perhaps this should be logged, or logged at a less verbose level?), leaving the pidfile containing a pid that is no longer correct.

On my machine, the pidfile created with the –make-pidfile options was consistently exactly three less than the PID shown in the output of ‘ps’

After making that change to the init file, I can now reliably start/stop the mongod process using the expected commands.

Hopefully that bug will be closed soon and released so that I don’t have to customize the init script on every mongo server I have.