I don't think it's advisable to modify mysql's user table. Although you can use it for authentication. Just make your program try to connect to mysql using the user's username and password. If access was denied then username / password is unauthorized but if the volume of users whos' going to use mysql is very large, then that would not be advisable. You can just create another database and a users table for that purpose and use connection pooling or a fixed connection to mysql and query your own users table to authenticate users. Hope this helps.

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