Maintaining a Secure MySQL connection

Question

I'm new to databases and all that stuff. Let's say I have an application that connects to a database to authenticate users. I have a table Students (the users) with their respective passwords. To connect to the database, in order to I need a MySQL connection that looks like this :

MySqlConnection("server=; database=; uid=; pwd=");

The problem is the fact that I need to hard-code the root password of the database in the application, therefore distributing the root password of the database to all users of the application. To me, it doesn't make sense ? Am I missing something ?

Answer 1

In general you have something like 'client server model'. The client (your c# app), connects to the server. The server then connects to the DB (and so only on the server side the user/pass is known).

client <-> server <-> mysql

I would say its bad practice to implement a db connection in the client. However, you could implement a per user database authorization. Meaning the client needs to enter (the mysql ) user/pass. But then you need to give the user certain 'rights' directly on the db. My guess is, you don't want that.