Thread

I’m working with the information security team at a university to certify our installation of EE as a secure application because we’re looking to connect to an LDAP database and house information about our users in the EE member database.

I’ve run into a question that I’m not sure how to answer so I’m hoping someone at EE might be able to help out.  The MySQL team here has told us that they don’t believe it’s possible for EE to support connections to a MySQL database using MySQL standard SSL encryption.  I’m not a MySQL expert and haven’t worked with encryption at all, so I’m not sure what to tell them.  Does EE support a connection to a MySQL database using MySQL standard SSL encryption?

I’m running EE 2.1.3 Build 20101220 and PHP 5.1.6.

Hi Stephen,

You wouldn’t do this from within EE, but it’s certainly possible to set this up on the server side. There are going to be many ways to do that depending on your environment, but as long as it’s transparent to EE, it should work fine.

Hi Brandon,

Thanks for getting back to me on this.  I sent your response on to our MySQL admins and here’s a slightly edited version of their response:

“They are suggesting that we implement something along the lines of IPSEC or SSH tunneling, but they don’t support mysql standard SSL/TLS encryption like everyone else. At any rate, theirs may be an appropriate suggestion if you are running your own dedicated application and database servers, but not suited to our ‘shared’ environment.”

Again, I don’t know much about encryption - does EE support standard SSL/TLS encryption?  Any information you could provide for me to pass on to them would be helpful since this is the last hurdle to getting our application certified.

Thanks!

Hi Stephen,

Yes, what they’re saying is correct. EE does not specifically support SSL/TLS in this manner, and a tunnel would be the way to go. It seems odd to have that requirement and then not be in a dedicated environment, but that’s purely an outsider’s perspective. At any rate this would be an excellent feature request; unfortunately it is not a current feature.

Thanks Brandon.  I’ll submit a feature request.  I appreciate the information.

Thanks Steven, and good luck. Going ahead and closing this topic but don’t hesitate to post again!