How to secure a connection to a remote mysql database

Question

I'm building a php web app with the codeigniter framework and I'm connection to a remote mysql database from my application.

Normally, I connect to my remote databases over a ssh tunnel for security reasons. But I'm unsure how to do this from within a php/codeigniter application. Anyone know how this is typically done?

Answer 1

You can connect to your Mysql Server directly via ssl. For an overview how to create certificates and the necessary changes to your configuration file have a look at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/creating-ssl-certs.html