11.1. User Authentication

The security of the entire database depends on identifying a user on verifying its authority, a procedure known as authentication. The information about users authorised to access a specific Firebird server is stored in a special security database named security2.fdb. Each record in security2.fdb is a user account for one user.

A user name, consisting of up to 31 characters, is a case-insensitive system identifier. A user must have a password, of which the first eight are significant. Whilst it is valid to enter a password longer than eight characters, any subsequent characters are ignored. Passwords are case-sensitive.

If the user specified during the connection is the SYSDBA, the database owner or a specially privileged user, that user will have unlimited access to the database.