Securing the Database - Database Design Manual: Using MySQL for Windows - page 145

Figure 12.11 Password encryption.

SELECT *
FROM

mysql.user

WHERE user=”Mary” and password=PASSWORD('yeti')

will give the results shown in Figure 12.12, returning one row, proving that the user and
password are correct. However, if you ran the following:

SELECT *
FROM mysql.user

WHERE user=”Mary” and password=PASSWORD('abominable')

the query would produce no results, as the Mary user's password is not abominable , the
encrypted version is not the same as the stored encrypted version, they therefore do not
match and so the password is proved to be incorrect. To check for a valid username and
password combination in your scripting language, simply check if you have more than 0
records returned from the query. Again, if this was being used on a webpage we would be

Figure 12.12 Matching encrypted passwords.