Access denied after setting user's password with SHA256 in phpMyAdmin

After seeing that default passwords generated by phpMyAdmin used mysql_native_password and therefore hashes didn't changed when equal passwords where used, I updated one user's password and set the hashing to SHA256.

When I tried to login again using the setted password it says:

mysqli_real_connect(): (HY000/1045): Access denied for user 'xxxx'@'xxxx' (using password: YES).

The server uses https and phpMyAdmin forces to uses SSL as well.

Once the password is changed with SHA256, the only way to gain access again is manually setting the password and reverting password plugin to mysql_native_password.

How can I login to phpMyAdmin with users using SHA256 passwords?

Note: if I try to use the same user and the SHA256 password to login to mysql console it works fine.

Solution 1:

MySQL has recently changed the default authentication type and, between MySQL and PHP, this change took quite a while to be supported by PHP. The old method was mysql_native_password and the new one is caching_sha2_password. PHP versions starting with 7.4 support the new method. Since this is related to PHP itself, phpMyAdmin supporting this method requires you to run an updated PHP installation (phpMyAdmin itself is ready for this change, but your ability to use it depends on your PHP version).

You basically have two options:

1. Upgrade your PHP to 7.4 or newer.
2. Change the authentication type on your user to the older mysql_native_password. You can do that by editing the user (from the User accounts tab in phpMyAdmin, edit the user, then change the authentication method from the dropdown).