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User Management and Authentication

Vitess uses its own mechanism for managing users and their permissions through VTGate. As a result, the CREATE USER.... and GRANT... statements will not work if sent through VTGate.

Authentication #

The Vitess VTGate component takes care of authentication for requests so we will need to add any users that should have access to the Keyspaces via the command-line options to VTGate.

The simplest way to configure users is using a static auth method and we can define the users in a JSON formatted file or string.

$ cat > users.json << EOF
{
  "vitess": [
    {
      "UserData": "vitess",
      "Password": "supersecretpassword"
    }
  ],
  "myuser1": [
    {
      "UserData": "myuser1",
      "Password": "password1"
    }
  ],
  "myuser2": [
    {
      "UserData": "myuser2",
      "Password": "password2"
    }
  ]
}
EOF

Then we can load this into VTGate with the additional commandline parameters:

vtgate $(cat <<END_OF_COMMAND
    -mysql_auth_server_impl=static
    -mysql_auth_server_static_file=users.json
    ...
    ...
    ...
END_OF_COMMAND
)

Now we can test our new users:

$ mysql -h 127.0.0.1 -u myuser1 -ppassword1 -e "select 1"
+---+
| 1 |
+---+
| 1 |
+---+

$ mysql -h 127.0.0.1 -u myuser1 -pincorrect_password -e "select 1"
ERROR 1045 (28000): Access denied for user 'myuser1'

Password format #

In the above example we used plaintext passwords. Vitess supports the MySQL mysql_native_password hash format, and you should always specify your passwords using this in a non-test or external environment. Vitess does not yet support the caching_sha2_password format that became the default for MySQL in 8.0.

To use a mysql_native_password hash, your user section in your static JSON authentication file would look something like this instead:

{
  "vitess": [
    {
      "UserData": "vitess",
      "MysqlNativePassword": "*9E128DA0C64A6FCCCDCFBDD0FC0A2C967C6DB36F"
    }
  ]
}

You can extract a mysql_native_password hash from an existing MySQL install by looking at the authentication_string column of the relevant user's row in the mysql.user table. An alternate way to generate this hash is to SHA1 the cleartext password string twice, e.g. doing it in MySQL for the cleartext password password:

mysql> SELECT UPPER(SHA1(UNHEX(SHA1("password")))) as hash;
+------------------------------------------+
| hash                                     |
+------------------------------------------+
| 2470C0C06DEE42FD1618BB99005ADCA2EC9D1E19 |
+------------------------------------------+
1 row in set (0.01 sec)

So, you would use *2470C0C06DEE42FD1618BB99005ADCA2EC9D1E19 as the MysqlNativePassword hash value for the cleartext password password.

UserData #

In the static authentication JSON file, the UserData string is not the username; the username is the string key for the list. The UserData string does not need to correspond to the username, and is used by the authorization mechanism when referring to a user. It is usually however simpler if you make the UserData string and the username the same.

The UserData feature can be leveraged to create multiple users that are equivalent to the authorization layer (i.e. multiple users having the same UserData strings), but are different in the authentication layer (i.e. have different usernames and passwords).

Multiple passwords #

A very convenient feature of the VTGate authorization is that, as can be seen in the example JSON authentication files, you have a list of UserData and Password/MysqlNativePassword pairs associated with a user. You can optionally leverage this to assign multiple different passwords to a single user, and VTGate will allow a user to authenticate with any of the defined passwords. This makes password rotation much easier; and less likely to require or cause downtime.

An example could be:

{
  "vitess": [
    {
      "UserData": "vitess_old",
      "MysqlNativePassword": "*9E128DA0C64A6FCCCDCFBDD0FC0A2C967C6DB36F"
    },
    {
      "UserData": "vitess_new",
      "MysqlNativePassword": "*B3AD996B12F211BEA47A7C666CC136FB26DC96AF"
    }
  ]
}

This feature also allows different UserData strings to be associated with a user depending on the password used. This can be used in concert with the authorization mechanism to migrate an application gracefully from one set of ACLs (or no ACLs) to another set of ACLs, by just changing the password used by the application.

In the example above, the username vitess has two different passwords that would be allowed, each resulting in different UserData strings (vitess_old or vitess_new) being passed to the VTTablet layer that can be used for authorization/ACL enforcement.

Other authentication methods #

Other than the static authentication file method above, other authentication mechanisms are also provided:

User Management and Authentication