Information
Use of the chroot() system call at startup, Systemd with settings to achieve isolation, or docker will put MariaDB in a Sandbox environment.
Rationale:
Running MariaDB in a Sandbox environment may reduce the impact of a MariaDB-born vulnerability by making portions of the file system inaccessible to the MariaDB instance.
Impact:
Use of the chroot option somewhat limits LOAD DATA INFILE and SELECT ... INTO OUTFILE.
NOTE: Nessus has not performed this check. Please review the benchmark to ensure target compliance.
Solution
Perform one of the following steps to remediate this setting:
Configure MariaDB to use chroot:
Choose a non-system partition <chroot location> for MariaDB
Add chroot=<chroot_location> to the my.cnf option file
Configure MariaDB to run under systemd:
If MariaDB is managed by systemd and running, stop the service:
$ sudo systemctl stop <mysqld>.service
If a mysql user and group do not already exist, create them:
$ sudo groupadd mysql
$ sudo useradd -r -g mysql -s /bin/false mysql
Set the ownership of the base directory:
$ sudo chown -R mysql:mysql /usr/local/mysql/
Create or modify the <mysqld>.service file in /lib/systemd/system to include the following entries, if not already present:
[Unit]
Description=MariaDB Server
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
[Service]
User=mysql
Group=mysql
If MariaDB was not already already managed by systemd execute this command:
$ sudo systemctl daemon-reload
Start the MariaDB server:
$ sudo systemctl start <mariadb>.service
If you would like MariaDB to automatically run at startup execute this command:
$ sudo systemctl enable <mariadb>.service
Follow documentation in the references for standing up MariaDB in a Docker container. During setup, follow the special notes below.
Do not set MARIADB_ALLOW_EMPTY_ROOT_PASSWORD or MYSQL_ALLOW_EMPTY_PASSWORD to a non-empty value.
Ensure that passwords are not set as values of any environment variables being passed to the Docker container. For example, do not orchestrate your container by passing MARIADB_ROOT_PASSWORD= as an environment attribute. Instead, securely set MARIADB_ROOT_PASSWORD within your environment, then simply tell Docker to pass MARIADB_ROOT_PASSWORD (without setting the value) to the container.