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Comment by TonyTrapp | Hacker News Reader

Then you should also be worried about bugs that let you log into an SSH session without providing your SSH certificate, passkey or whatever. Authentication bypass can happen with pretty much any buggy authentication method. None of this is inherently a problem of passwords or basic auth.

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Sure, but phpMyAdmin has a long history of major security holes. It's existence on a server tends to be a red flag.

Again, the premise was that phpMyAdmin is secured behind basic auth. It doesn't matter how secure or insecure phpMyAdmin is, it only matters how secure whatever webserver is that it is served through. phpMyAdmin code isn't even touched before the basic auth login was successful. Only after that, it becomes relevant, in that you either find a hole in phpMyAdmin itself, or you have to break another (hopefully strong) password for the MySQL login itself.

It's not using the webserver's basic auth, it's using their own implementation (https://github.com/phpmyadmin/phpmyadmin/blob/297c1e174b93a9..., via PHP's: https://www.php.net/manual/en/features.http-auth.php).

You can easily put phpMyAdmin behind basic auth as an additional security layer, completely bypassing any PHP execution and letting the web server completely handle the authentication. It's exactly what I have done multiple times in the past. Arguably phpMyAdmin's direct integration is a less secure way of doing it, but do we even know if it's the basic auth itself that was bypassed, or was it just the case of a weak password?

Sure, and I can put the VX gas vials in a safe in my basement, but I'd rather not have them anywhere near me at all.

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