Network Deployment (Distributed operating systems), v8.0 > Develop and deploying applications > Develop security > Develop extensions to the WebSphere security infrastructure > Enable a plugpoint for custom password encryption

Plug point for custom password encryption

A plug point for custom password encryption can be created to encrypt and decrypt all passwords in WAS that are currently encoded or decoded using Base64-encoding.

The implementation class of this plug point has the responsibility for managing keys, determining the encryption algorithm to use, and for protecting the master secret. The WAS runtime stores the encrypted passwords in their existing locations, preceded with {custom:alias} tags instead of {xor} tags. The custom part of the tag indicates that it is a custom algorithm. The alias part of the tag is specified by the custom implementation, which helps to indicate how the password is encrypted. The implementation can include the key alias, encryption algorithm, encryption mode, or encryption padding.

A custom provider of this plug point must implement an interface that is designed to encrypt and decrypt passwords. The interface is called by the WAS runtime whenever the custom plug point is enabled. The custom algorithm becomes one of the supported algorithms when the plug point is enabled. Other supported algorithms include {xor} (standard base64 encoding) and {os400} which is used on the iSeries platform.

The following example illustrates the com.ibm.wsspi.security.crypto.CustomPasswordEncryption interface:

package com.ibm.wsspi.security.crypto;
public interface CustomPasswordEncryption
{

    /**
     * The encrypt operation takes a UTF-8 encoded String in the form of a byte[].
     * The byte[] is generated from String.getBytes("UTF-8").
     * An encrypted byte[] is returned from the implementation in the EncryptedInfo
     * object.  Additionally, a logical key alias is returned in the EncryptedInfo
     * objectwhich is passed back into the decrypt method to determine which key was
     * used to encrypt this password. The WAS runtime has
     * no knowledge of the algorithm or the key used to encrypt the data.
     *
     * @param byte[]
     * @return com.ibm.wsspi.security.crypto.EncryptedInfo
     * @throws com.ibm.wsspi.security.crypto.PasswordEncryptException
     **/
    public EncryptedInfo encrypt (byte[] decrypted_bytes) throws PasswordEncryptException;

    /**
     * The decrypt operation takes the EncryptedInfo object containing a byte[]
     * and the logical key alias and converts it to the decrypted byte[].  The
      *WAS runtime converts the byte[] to a String
     * using new String (byte[], "UTF-8");
     *
     * @param com.ibm.wsspi.security.crypto.EncryptedInfo
     * @return byte[]
     * @throws com.ibm.wsspi.security.crypto.PasswordDecryptException
     **/
    public byte[] decrypt (EncryptedInfo info) throws PasswordDecryptException;

    /**
     * The following is reserved for future use and is currently not
     * called by the WAS runtime.
     *
     * @param java.util.HashMap
     **/
    public void initialize (java.util.HashMap initialization_data);
}

The com.ibm.wsspi.security.crypto.EncryptedInfo class contains the encrypted bytes with the user-defined alias that is associated with the encrypted bytes. This information is passed back into the encryption method to help determine how the password was originally encrypted.

package com.ibm.wsspi.security.crypto;
public class EncryptedInfo
{
    private byte[] bytes;
    private String alias;

/**
 * This constructor takes the encrypted bytes and a keyAlias as parameters.
 * This constructor is used to pass to or from the WAS
  *  runtime to enable the runtime to associate the bytes with a specific key that
  *  is used to encrypt the bytes.
 */

    public EncryptedInfo (byte[] encryptedBytes, String keyAlias)
    {
        bytes = encryptedBytes;
        alias = keyAlias;
    }

/**
 * This command returns the encrypted bytes.
 *
 * @return byte[]
 */
    public byte[] getEncryptedBytes()
    {
        return bytes;
    }

/**
 * This command returns the key alias.  The key alias is a logical string that is
 * associated with the encrypted password in the model. The format is
 * {custom:keyAlias}encrypted_password. Typically, just the key alias is placed
 * here, but algorithm information can also be returned.
 *
 * @return String  */
    public String getKeyAlias()
    {
        return alias;
    }

}

The encryption method is called for password processing whenever the custom class is configured and custom encryption is enabled. The decryption method is called whenever the custom class is configured and the password contains the {custom:alias} tag . The custom:alias tag is stripped prior to decryption. See Enable custom password encryption.
Implement custom password encryption
Enable custom password encryption
Disable custom password encryption
Enable a plugpoint for custom password encryption

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