Kevin Schroeder has a quick post to his site showing the Magento users out there how to configure the SSL connection to their MySQL database backend.

’ve been asked a few times now if there is a way to use encrypted MySQL connections in Magento. [...] The answer, to my surprise, is that there is no way of doing it out of the box.

[...] All database configurations are stored in the local.xml file and the XML specification does not allow numbers for XML node names. So no matter how you try to slice it it looks like getting the SSL settings into the Magento adapter will not work without a code change. The Internet seems to confirm this. But that doesn’t mean that it can’t be done. So I wrote a quick Magento adapter that allows you to pass in the constant values.

He walks you through the process of getting the adapter installed, configuring MySQL to allow for the SSL connections and the configuration change to make. He includes the XML you'll need to update, including the addition of a secure_driver_options to the XML to provide the necessary SSL connection information.