Authentication plugins

MariaDB also supports authentication plugins. These plugins can implement different methods for login and logout. Generally, this is useful to prevent an external program from authenticating users into a MariaDB server. Some plugins require the client to interact with them using appropriate client plugins. The client plugins are dynamically loaded and need not be installed, but this requires the client to be built dynamically.

Currently, MariaDB 10.0 comes with four authentication plugins:

• mysql_native_password: This is the default MariaDB authentication plugin

• mysql_old_password: This is the old (less secure) password hashing used in MySQL 4.0 and even in MySQL 3.23 (they had 20-byte and 9-byte shadowed passwords, respectively)

• unix_socket: This plugin uses the credentials of the Unix user

• pam: This plugin uses Unix Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM)

The last two plugins are not installed by default. They can be installed with the following statements:

INSTALL SONAME...