About Password and Key Encryption

• Database secret key
• SSH keys
• Compute node root password
• User API secret key
• VNC password

CloudStack uses the Java Simplified Encryption (JASYPT) library. The data values are encrypted and decrypted using a database secret key, which is stored in one of CloudStack’s internal properties files along with the database password. The other encrypted values listed above, such as SSH keys, are in the CloudStack internal database.

The encryption type, database secret key, and Management Server secret key are set during CloudStack installation. They are all parameters to the CloudStack database setup script (cloudstack-setup-databases). The default values are file, password, and password. It is, of course, highly recommended that you change these to more secure keys.

Additionally, the plain text user authenticator has been modified not to convert supplied passwords to their md5 sums before checking them with the database entries. It performs a simple string comparison between retrieved and supplied login passwords instead of comparing the retrieved md5 hash of the stored password against the supplied md5 hash of the password because clients no longer hash the password. The following method determines what encoding scheme is used to encode the password supplied during user creation or modification.

In the above default ordering, SHA256Salt is used first for UserPasswordEncoders. If the module is found and encoding returns a valid value, the encoded password is stored in the user table’s password column. If it fails for any reason, the MD5UserAuthenticator will be tried next, and the order continues. For UserAuthenticators, SHA256Salt authentication is tried first. If it succeeds, the user is logged into the Management server. If it fails, md5 is tried next, and attempts continues until any of them succeeds and the user logs in . If none of them works, the user is returned an invalid credential message.