Passwords

Assign a password to a user to allow that user to connect to the database using password authentication. When the user supplies the correct password a connection to the database occurs.

Vertica stores passwords in an encrypted format to prevent potential theft. However, the transmission of the password to Vertica is in plain text. Thus, it is possible for a "man-in-the-middle" attack to intercept the password.

Implementing Hash Authentication ensures secure login using passwords.

About Password Creation and Modification

You must be a superuser to create passwords for user accounts using the CREATE USER statement. A superuser can set any user account's password.

• To add a password, use the ALTER USER statement.
• To change a password, use ALTER USER or the vsql meta-command \password.

Users can also change their own passwords.

To make password authentication more effective, Vertica recommends that you enforce password policies that control how often users are forced to change passwords and the required content of a password. You set these policies using Profiles.

Default Password Authentication

When you have not specified any authentication methods, Vertica defaults to using password authentication for user accounts that have passwords.

If you create authentication methods, even for remote hosts, password authentication is disabled. In such cases, you must explicitly enable password authentication. The following commands create the local_pwd authentication method and make it the default for all users. When you create an authentication method, Vertica enables it automatically:

=> CREATE AUTHENTICATION local_pwd METHOD hash' LOCAL;
=> GRANT AUTHENTICATION local_pwd To Public;