6.3.7.1. The Native Authentication Plugins

MySQL includes two plugins that implement the same kind of native authentication that older servers provide; that is, authentication against passwords stored in the Password column of the mysql.user table:

The mysql_native_password authentication plugin implements the same default authentication against the mysql.user table as used prior to the implementation of pluggable authentication.
The mysql_old_password plugin implements authentication as used before MySQL 4.1.1 that is based on shorter password hash values. For information about this authentication method, see Section 6.1.2.4, "Password Hashing in MySQL".

The native authentication plugins are backward compatible. Clients older than MySQL 5.5.7 do not support authentication plugins but use native authentication, so they can connect to servers from 5.5.7 and up.

The following tables show the plugin names. Both are considered to implement native authentication even though only one has "native" in the name.

Table 6.8. MySQL Native Password Authentication Plugin

Server-side plugin name	`mysql_native_password`
Client-side plugin name	`mysql_native_password`
Library object file name	None (plugins are built in)

Table 6.9. MySQL Native Old-Password Authentication Plugin

Server-side plugin name	`mysql_old_password`
Client-side plugin name	`mysql_old_password`
Library object file name	None (plugins are built in)

Each plugin exists in both client and server form. MySQL client programs use mysql_native_password by default. The --default-auth option can be used to specify either plugin explicitly:

shell> mysql --default-auth=mysql_native_password
        ...shell> mysql --default-auth=mysql_old_password ...

The server-side plugins are built into the server, need not be loaded explicitly, and cannot be disabled by unloading them. The client-side plugins are built into the libmysqlclient client library as of MySQL 5.5.7 and available to any program linked against libmysqlclient from that version or newer.

For general information about pluggable authentication in MySQL, see Section 6.3.7, "Pluggable Authentication".