The problem is that clients implementing the 4.0 version of the
protocol (that is, mysql-4.0) do not null terminate a string
at the end of the authentication packet. These clients denote
the end of the string with the end of the packet.

Although this goes against the documented (see MySQL Internals
ClientServer Protocol wiki) description of the protocol, these
old clients still need to be supported.

The solution is to support the documented and actual behavior
of the clients. If a client is using the pre-4.1 version of
the protocol, the end of a string in the authentication packet
can either be denoted with a null character or by the end of
the packet. This restores backwards compatibility with old
clients implementing either the documented or actual behavior.