Database Security

As a brief conclusion to this chapter, I should mention a few of the security issues to consider when using and administrating your databases. Then I will demonstrate two final MySQL functions that can be used to encrypt data.

Security practices

If you have administrative-level control over your database, you should keep in mind the following:

  • Do not allow anonymous users to connect to MySQL.

  • Always require a password to connect to MySQL.

  • Require users to also specify a hostname. This limits from where users can and cannot access MySQL (although it can be more tedious).

  • When storing sensitive information in a table, particularly passwords, protect the data first using either the PASSWORD() or ENCODE() functions, which will be ...

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