Ok, this is now figured out. To activate YaSSL you must have 'ssl=on' in the config and no ssl_cipher defined.
50-server.cnf: ssl=on => MariaDB [(none)]> SHOW VARIABLES LIKE '%ssl%'; +---------------------+-------------+ | Variable_name | Value | +---------------------+-------------+ | have_openssl | NO | | have_ssl | YES | | ssl_ca | | | ssl_capath | | | ssl_cert | | | ssl_cipher | | | ssl_crl | | | ssl_crlpath | | | ssl_key | | | version_ssl_library | YaSSL 2.4.2 | +---------------------+-------------+ YaSSL does not support TLS v1.2 for sure and when I tried 1.1 and 1.0 it didn't work either. Apparently you cannot define a cipher, as it seems to disable YaSSL. The solution here is to fix the documentation part: https://anonscm.debian.org/git/pkg-mysql/mariadb-10.1.git/commit/?id=a27f5ace9786032a5d97d40964dcf8f1a6829a40 Props Vicentiu!