Java Password Vault

[Teena Ruiter]

Apassword vault is used to mask passwords and other sensitive strings, and store them in an encrypted Java keystore. This allows you to eliminate storing clear-text passwords in your Tomcat configuration files, as Tomcat can lookup passwords and other sensitive strings from a keystore using the vault.

The examples and commands below use JWS_HOME as the JBoss Web Server installation directory. Replace JWS_HOME with the path to your JBoss Web Server installation. Also, the paths below use / for directory separators.

To set the CATALINA_BASE directory, follow the instructions in the section 'Advanced Configuration - Multiple Tomcat Instances' in the Running The Apache Tomcat 9.0 Servlet/JSP Container document found on the Apache Tomcat Website.

The vault must be initialized before it can be used to store sensitive strings. This is done using the JWS_HOME/tomcat/bin/tomcat-vault.sh vault script. For Microsoft Windows, the script is tomcat-vault.bat.

The script can be run interactively or non-interactively. Below is an example of an interactive execution of the script to initialize a password vault, with the values shown below using the example keystore from the previous step.

In JWS_HOME/tomcat/conf/, create a file named vault.properties containing the vault configuration produced when initializing the vault. The values provided below use the example vault initialized in the previous steps.

The Vault for Apache Tomcat can be created non-interactively by providing the required input as arguments to the tomcat-vault.sh script. The vault.properties file is also created as output of the tomcat-vault.sh script when the -g, --generate-config option is used.

When adding a string to a password vault, the sensitive string needs a name that it will be referred by. For a password vault, this name is called an attribute name, and the password itself is called a secured attribute.

The example below demonstrates using the vault script non-interactively to store a password. It uses the vault that was initialized in the previous steps, and stores the sensitive string P@SSW0#D with the attribute name manager_password.

I have a spring application running on Jboss. I have passwords that I dont want to store in the DB. Those passwords are used inside the application code e.g. Email account password to send emails via Java mail API.

Hello, so you can use the Vault to encrypt the data that are appear on the configuration files of JBoss. You can use for example to encrypt the DB password that you use on the standalone.xml configuration. It is not an API perse.

That vault mechanism is not appropriate to encrypt application side data, you will need to do this you can follow the answer provided by Johannes Brodwall seems very complete and the complementary answer by user1007231 will help you with the Master password.

At the moment we store the passwords in a plain text file to sign into git and other services. We want to finaly get rid of it and use the windows credential manager. The only problem we are facing is that I don't seem to find a solution to do it java.

We actually have the same issue come up in our company.We have a Java Client Application running on windows and the customer asked for a password saving functionality. So we turned to the windows credential manager for that. So much for the background.

Thus the way we planned is to write java code using the java native interface with C accessing the windows credential manager.BUT I found this library, which has a java class written for accessing the windows credential manager.

The dependency I used was implementation("com.microsoft.alm:auth-secure-storage:0.6.4") and the resulting Credential object allows me to read the user/password. Also, the CredManagerBackedCredentialStore object allows to add entries into the Windows Credential Manager.

I want to make a java password manager so I want to encrypt the passwords and insert it into the database then retrieve it decryptedcan you please explain to me how to do it?And what type of encryption algorithms should I use?

It's not generally recommended to make your own encryption method, because there is a high possibility it is not as secure as ones that have been rigorously tested for integrity. (Like the ones as mentioned)

It's important to say that in standalone mode, my keystore and datasources' encrypted passwords work fine. I noticed that in domain mode, even if I ommit the tag in host.xml, I got exactly the same error / exception.

Thank you for the reply! What do you mean by "each of the servers needs to have the vault locally"? Each JBoss machine in the domain here have the vault locally. But the *virtual* servers declared in my host.xml don't have any vault tag, should they have (I don't think so, looking at the xsd)? Even if I start a single Jboss (the domain controller), the problem occurs. I really need to store encrypted passwords, and domain mode would save us lot of work when configuring the nodes.

This is for server element which is the root element in standalone.xml, no? The server element for host.xml is declared at line 78. The type serversType is declared at line 748, tha references the serverType declared at line 754. It looks really weird, the configuration conforms to the XSD, but JBoss in domain mode seem to ignore that. The problem is that Jboss does not figure out that the $VAULT::dbpd03DS::password::YWU2NTAxZmYtMGEyZi00ZjI2LWI5MmMtNDk5OGYxZjJlYzVkTElORV9CUkVBS3ZhdWx0; in domain.xml (datasource subsystem) references an entry of the vault declared at host.xml.

[Server:pd-master-virtual-server-01] 19:58:42,077 INFO [org.jboss.security.vault.SecurityVaultFactory] (Controller Boot Thread) Getting Security Vault with implementation of org.picketbox.plugins.vault.PicketBoxSecurityVault

If you're working with Azure Key Vault Secrets resources in a Spring application, we recommend that you consider Spring Cloud Azure as an alternative. Spring Cloud Azure is an open-source project that provides seamless Spring integration with Azure services. To learn more about Spring Cloud Azure, and to see an example using Key Vault Secrets, see Load a secret from Azure Key Vault in a Spring Boot application.

This quickstart is using the Azure Identity library with Azure CLI to authenticate user to Azure Services. Developers can also use Visual Studio or Visual Studio Code to authenticate their calls, for more information, see Authenticate the client with Azure Identity client library.

Application requests to most Azure services must be authorized. Using the DefaultAzureCredential class is the recommended approach for implementing passwordless connections to Azure services in your code. DefaultAzureCredential supports multiple authentication methods and determines which method should be used at runtime. This approach enables your app to use different authentication methods in different environments (local vs. production) without implementing environment-specific code.

In this quickstart, DefaultAzureCredential authenticates to key vault using the credentials of the local development user logged into the Azure CLI. When the application is deployed to Azure, the same DefaultAzureCredential code can automatically discover and use a managed identity that is assigned to an App Service, Virtual Machine, or other services. For more information, see Managed Identity Overview.

In this quickstart, you created a key vault, stored a secret, retrieved it, and then deleted it. To learn more about Key Vault and how to integrate it with your applications, continue on to these articles.

To use a password vault with Automic Automation, you have to set it up on an accessible host and install a compatible local Client on the same host in which the Automation Engine runs. Also, Automic Automation has to be added as an application to the password vault and must be configured accordingly, at least with a name.

Note: The local Client is used for the integration with the Automation Engine and contains libraries which must be specified using the libpath parameter in the JWP section of the configuration file (ucsrv.ini). You must restart all Java server processes after setting or changing the libpath parameter in the configuration file (ucsrv.ini).

After the application has been set up and integrated into Automic Automation, you have to use the UC_EXTERNAL_VAULTS variable to define how the password vault is identified in your system. Once the setup is complete, the Automation Engine can communicate with the vault.

The local Client uses a cache which can supply credentials even if there is a network failure or the vault cannot be accessed. The information that is saved in the cache is encrypted and can only be access following the same authentication criteria that are required to retrieve any other information from the vault. In case the password retrieval fails, the Automation Engine uses the last known credentials cached by the local Client.

If the local Client is not available or if the Automation Engine does not have permission to fetch the password, the user receives a message (last message of the job) with the relevant information and the respective status of the job is set to FAULT_OTHER. For more information, see System Return Codes of Executable Objects.

Note: If a Job fails with FAULT_OTHER and the error message "U00045195 The password request failed with the error message: 'The encryption of the password failed with the error message: Illegal key size or default parameters'." is displayed, you must to copy the Java Cryptography Extension (JCE) Unlimited Strength Jurisdiction Policy Files into the /jre/lib/security folder used by the AWI.

The Automation Engine requests the credentials and the request server verifies that the application details defined in the password vault match the ones of the run-time application. If they do match, the user is granted permission to the vault, the request server retrieves the password and passes it on to the Automation Engine.

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