Security with Amazon Aurora MySQL

Security for Amazon Aurora MySQL is managed at three levels:

In the following sections, see information about user permissions for Aurora MySQL and TLS connections with Aurora MySQL DB clusters.

Master user privileges with Amazon Aurora MySQL

When you create an Amazon Aurora MySQL DB instance, the master user has the default privileges listed in Master user account privileges.

To provide management services for each DB cluster, the admin and rdsadmin users are created when the DB cluster is created. Attempting to drop, rename, change the password, or change privileges for the rdsadmin account results in an error.

In Aurora MySQL version 2 DB clusters, the admin and rdsadmin users are created when the DB cluster is created. In Aurora MySQL version 3 DB clusters, the admin, rdsadmin, and rds_superuser_role users are created.

For management of the Aurora MySQL DB cluster, the standard kill and kill_query commands have been restricted. Instead, use the Amazon RDS commands rds_kill and rds_kill_query to terminate user sessions or queries on Aurora MySQL DB instances.

TLS connections to Aurora MySQL DB clusters

Amazon Aurora MySQL DB clusters support Transport Layer Security (TLS) connections from applications using the same process and public key as RDS for MySQL DB instances.

Amazon RDS creates an TLS certificate and installs the certificate on the DB instance when Amazon RDS provisions the instance. These certificates are signed by a certificate authority. The TLS certificate includes the DB instance endpoint as the Common Name (CN) for the TLS certificate to guard against spoofing attacks. As a result, you can only use the DB cluster endpoint to connect to a DB cluster using TLS if your client supports Subject Alternative Names (SAN). Otherwise, you must use the instance endpoint of a writer instance.

For information about downloading certificates, see Using SSL/TLS to encrypt a connection to a DB cluster.

We recommend the AWS JDBC Driver as a client that supports SAN with TLS. For more information about the AWS JDBC Driver and complete instructions for using it, see the Amazon Web Services (AWS) JDBC Driver GitHub repository.

Requiring a TLS connection to an Aurora MySQL DB cluster

You can require that all user connections to your Aurora MySQL DB cluster use TLS by using the require_secure_transport DB cluster parameter. By default, the require_secure_transport parameter is set to OFF. You can set the require_secure_transport parameter to ON to require TLS for connections to your DB cluster.

You can set the require_secure_transport parameter value by updating the DB cluster parameter group for your DB cluster. You don't need to reboot your DB cluster for the change to take effect. For more information on parameter groups, see Parameter groups for Amazon Aurora.

When the require_secure_transport parameter is set to ON for a DB cluster, a database client can connect to it if it can establish an encrypted connection. Otherwise, an error message similar to the following is returned to the client:

MySQL Error 3159 (HY000): Connections using insecure transport are prohibited while --require_secure_transport=ON.

TLS versions for Aurora MySQL

Aurora MySQL supports Transport Layer Security (TLS) versions 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3. Starting in Aurora MySQL version 3.04.0 and higher, you can use the TLS 1.3 protocol to secure your connections. The following table shows the TLS support for Aurora MySQL versions.

You can use the tls_version DB cluster parameter to indicate the permitted protocol versions. Similar client parameters exist for most client tools or database drivers. Some older clients might not support newer TLS versions. By default, the DB cluster attempts to use the highest TLS protocol version allowed by both the server and client configuration.

Set the tls_version DB cluster parameter to one of the following values:

You can also set the tls_version parameter as a string of comma-separated list. If you want to use both TLS 1.2 and TLS 1.0 protocols, the tls_version parameter must include all protocols from the lowest to the highest protocol. In this case, tls_version is set as:

tls_version=TLSv1,TLSv1.1,TLSv1.2

For information about modifying parameters in a DB cluster parameter group, see Modifying parameters in a DB cluster parameter group in Amazon Aurora. If you use the AWS CLI to modify the tls_version DB cluster parameter, the ApplyMethod must be set to pending-reboot. When the application method is pending-reboot, changes to parameters are applied after you stop and restart the DB clusters associated with the parameter group.

Configuring cipher suites for connections to Aurora MySQL DB clusters

By using configurable cipher suites, you can have more control over the security of your database connections. You can specify a list of cipher suites that you want to allow to secure client TLS connections to your database. With configurable cipher suites, you can control the connection encryption that your database server accepts. Doing this prevents the use of insecure or deprecated ciphers.

Configurable cipher suites are supported in Aurora MySQL version 3 and Aurora MySQL version 2. To specify the list of permissible TLS 1.2, TLS 1.1, TLS 1.0 ciphers for encrypting connections, modify the ssl_cipher cluster parameter. Set the ssl_cipher parameter in a cluster parameter group using the AWS Management Console, the AWS CLI, or the RDS API.

Set the ssl_cipher parameter to a string of comma-separated cipher values for your TLS version. For the client application, you can specify the ciphers to use for encrypted connections by using the --ssl-cipher option when connecting to the database. For more about connecting to your database, see Connecting to an Amazon Aurora MySQL DB cluster.

Starting in Aurora MySQL version 3.04.0 and higher, you can specify TLS 1.3 cipher suites. To specify the permissible TLS 1.3 cipher suites, modify the tls_ciphersuites parameter in your parameter group. TLS 1.3 has reduced the number of available cipher suites due to changes in the naming convention that removes the key exchange mechanism and certificate used. Set the tls_ciphersuites to a string of comma-separated cipher values for TLS 1.3.

The following table shows the supported ciphers along with the TLS encryption protocol and valid Aurora MySQL engine versions for each cipher.

For information about modifying parameters in a DB cluster parameter group, see Modifying parameters in a DB cluster parameter group in Amazon Aurora. If you use the CLI to modify the ssl_cipher DB cluster parameter, make sure to set the ApplyMethod to pending-reboot. When the application method is pending-reboot, changes to parameters are applied after you stop and restart the DB clusters associated with the parameter group.

You can also use the describe-engine-default-cluster-parameters CLI command to determine which cipher suites are currently supported for a specific parameter group family. The following example shows how to get the allowed values for the ssl_cipher cluster parameter for Aurora MySQL version 2.

aws rds describe-engine-default-cluster-parameters --db-parameter-group-family aurora-mysql5.7

        ...some output truncated...
	{
		"ParameterName": "ssl_cipher",
		"ParameterValue": "DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA,DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256,DHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256,DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA,DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA256,DHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384,ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA,ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256,ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256,ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA,ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA384,ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384",
		"Description": "The list of permissible ciphers for connection encryption.",
		"Source": "system",
		"ApplyType": "static",
		"DataType": "list",
		"AllowedValues": "DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA,DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256,DHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256,DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA,DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA256,DHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384,ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA,ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA256,ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256,ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA,ECDHE-RSA-AES256-SHA384,ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384",
		"IsModifiable": true,
		"SupportedEngineModes": [
			"provisioned"
		]
	},
       ...some output truncated...

For more information about ciphers, see the ssl_cipher variable in the MySQL documentation. For more information about cipher suite formats, see the openssl-ciphers list format and openssl-ciphers string format documentation on the OpenSSL website.

Encrypting connections to an Aurora MySQL DB cluster

To encrypt connections using the default mysql client, launch the mysql client using the --ssl-ca parameter to reference the public key, for example:

For MySQL 5.7 and 8.0:

mysql -h myinstance.123456789012.rds-us-east-1.amazonaws.com
--ssl-ca=full_path_to_CA_certificate --ssl-mode=VERIFY_IDENTITY

For MySQL 5.6:

mysql -h myinstance.123456789012.rds-us-east-1.amazonaws.com
--ssl-ca=full_path_to_CA_certificate --ssl-verify-server-cert

Replace full_path_to_CA_certificate with the full path to your Certificate Authority (CA) certificate. For information about downloading a certificate, see Using SSL/TLS to encrypt a connection to a DB cluster.

You can require TLS connections for specific users accounts. For example, you can use one of the following statements, depending on your MySQL version, to require TLS connections on the user account encrypted_user.

For MySQL 5.7 and 8.0:

ALTER USER 'encrypted_user'@'%' REQUIRE SSL;            

For MySQL 5.6:

GRANT USAGE ON *.* TO 'encrypted_user'@'%' REQUIRE SSL;

When you use an RDS Proxy, you connect to the proxy endpoint instead of the usual cluster endpoint. You can make SSL/TLS required or optional for connections to the proxy, in the same way as for connections directly to the Aurora DB cluster. For information about using RDS Proxy, see Amazon RDS Proxy for Aurora.