The Password Validation Component •User-name matching is case-sensitive. The password and user name values are compared as binary strings on a byte-by-byte basis. •If a password matches the user name,  VALIDATE_PASSWORD_STRENGTH()  returns 0 regardless of how other  validate_password  system variables are set. • validate_password.dictionary_file • validate_password.length The path name of the dictionary file that  validate_password  uses for checking passwords. This variable is unavailable unless  validate_password  is installed. By default, this variable has an empty value and dictionary checks are not performed. For dictionary checks to occur, the variable value must be nonempty. If the file is named as a relative path, it is interpreted relative to the server data directory. File contents should be lowercase, one word per line. Contents are treated as having a character set of  utf8 . The maximum permitted file size is 1MB. For the dictionary file to be used during password checking, the password policy must be set to 2 ( STRONG ); see the description of the  validate_password.policy  system variable. Assuming that is true, each substring of the password of length 4 up to 100 is compared to the words in the dictionary file. Any match causes the password to be rejected. Comparisons are not case-sensitive. For  VALIDATE_PASSWORD_STRENGTH() , the password is checked against all policies, including  STRONG , so the strength assessment includes the dictionary check regardless of the validate_password.policy  value. validate_password.dictionary_file  can be set at runtime and assigning a value causes the named file to be read without a server restart. 1389 Command-Line Format --validate-password.length=# System Variable validate_password.length Scope Global Dynamic Yes SET_VAR  Hint Applies No Type Integer Default Value 8 Command-Line Format --validate-password.dictionary- file=file_name System Variable validate_password.dictionary_file Scope Global Dynamic Yes SET_VAR  Hint Applies No Type File name