Category: Security
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When AI Finds the Bugs We Missed: A Very Busy Year for MariaDB Security
You may have noticed that some recent MariaDB Server releases arrived a little later than expected. Sorry about that! But there is a good reason for it.
Over the last months, the MariaDB project has experienced something we had never seen before: a very large increase in security reports. And when I say large, look at this graph:
For years, we received a few security reports every quarter. Sometimes 3, sometimes 6, 11… the highest in the graph was 16.
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Rethinking PAM
PAM, Pluggable Authentication Modules, originated in Solaris and became common place in all Linux, BSDs, and AIX, HP-UX and macOS. MariaDB has had PAM support as an option since MariaDB 5.2.10 becoming stable in 10.0.11. So if this is all old and boring why reconsider it? The environment in which Linux operates with PAM has changed in the last 15 years.
MariaDB’s PAM plugin version 1 (as its become known) has a restriction, because the pam module loaded was loaded […]
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Deploying the MariaDB Privacy-First Stack Anywhere with Terraform
In my previous post, I introduced the MariaDB Privacy-First Stack.
Nextcloud for collaboration, Passbolt for passwords and secrets, and MariaDB Server for the data.
Simple enough.
But after explaining what the stack is, the next question is usually very practical:
Where can I deploy it?
And the answer should not be:
On the cloud provider the template was written for.
That would be a strange way to talk about digital sovereignty.
If the architecture is really meant to give you […]
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MariaDB 11.8 LTS Released
Now is a good time to upgrade to the freshest MariaDB Server. MariaDB 11.8 is the yearly long term support release for 2025. It’s the first LTS with support for MariaDB Vector, and it includes a number of other updates based on user requests. You can seamlessly upgrade to MariaDB 11.8 from MariaDB 11.4 (the previous LTS) or any older release, back to MariaDB Server 10.0 or earlier, including most versions of MySQL Server.
MariaDB 11.8 LTS includes everything added […]
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MariaDB, an Open Source Alternative
We live in a world where national interests intertwine with IT vendor interests. Interest is currently booming in “European Alternatives“. I’m happy to note that MariaDB Server is unaffected by considerations related to protectionism. In fact, choosing Open Source protects the user – an individual, an organisation, or a government – from protectionism itself.
Licensing prevails over national interests
Politicians come and go. National interests prevail a bit longer than individual politicians.Companies also evolve, get acquired and merged across national […]
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MariaDB 11.8 is LTS
Confirming what you probably already expected: MariaDB Server 11.8 will be a long-term support release.
Now a Release Candidate – GA in May
With MariaDB Vector as the lead new feature, MariaDB 11.8 succeeds the previous LTS MariaDB 11.4 from a year ago.
As of now, MariaDB 11.8 is at the Release Candidate stage, with GA planned for May.
Lots of new features since MariaDB 11.4
MariaDB 11.8 has about 60 features, large and small, on top of the previous […]
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MariaDB Dump File Compatibility Change
Both MariaDB and MySQL have been around a long time now, and there is always a difficult balance between maintaining compatibility whilst also solving security issues that arise. With the latest bugfix releases of MariaDB, we had to break compatibility a little to improve security, but there are workarounds. We figured we should explain the reasons behind it and how to make things as painless as possible for you.
The Problem
The problem we were solving, and for various reasons […]
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Mission Impossible: Zero-Configuration SSL
SSL (let’s call it that, even though SSL 2.0 and SSL 3.0 were long replaced by TLS 1.0–1.3 protocols) support was implemented in MySQL in 2001, so MariaDB (born in 2009) always had it. But over more than twenty years of SSL support there was one huge problem with it. It required tedious manual configuration, so most users never bothered and accepted the fact that their queries and data were sent unprotected. Which might have been slightly risky in 2001, […]