Encrypting/Decrypting passwords Post: 302803405

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Top Forums Programming Encrypting/Decrypting passwords Post 302803405 by mdrisser on Monday 6th of May 2013 04:20:19 PM

05-06-2013

Registered User

Encrypting/Decrypting passwords

I know that simply encrypting and decrypting passwords in a script is as bad as storing them in plain text, but I've been searching for an answer to this for a few days now, and haven't found an answer that fits the problem I'm having.

Here's the scenario. I'll give more details than I think may be relevant, just in case...

I have a VMware Management Assistant machine running SuSE Enterprise 11, which in turn is talking to an APC UPS. When the UPS goes to battery power it is set to run a script that will gracefully shutdown the VMware virtual machines running on an ESXi cluster. In order to do this the script needs to be able to automatically login to the ESXi machines using a local (to the ESXi machines) username/password combo.

I've written the script to handle the shutdowns in Perl using VMware's API, but the username/password issue has me stumped. Prompting for a password won't work as I need it to run automatically (what happens if the power goes out and no one is around to enter the password?).

I'm at quite a loss as to how to handle this situation. I know I could hash the password using something like Authen::Passphrase::BlowfishCrypt, but how would I then pass it to the ESXi host for the login? Am I maybe approaching this whole thing from the wrong direction, or is there a solution that I'm just not seeing?

Thanks in advance for your help.

mdrisser

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LEARN ABOUT DEBIAN

dircproxy-crypt

dircproxy-crypt(1)					      General Commands Manual						dircproxy-crypt(1)

NAME

       dircproxy-crypt - Generate encrypted password for dircproxy

SYNOPSIS

       dircproxy-crypt [-hv] [password]...

DESCRIPTION

       dircproxy-crypt generates encrypted passwords for the dircproxy(1) configuration file.  These passwords are used in the 'password' configu-
       ration option of a connection class, and are compared to the password you configure your IRC client to use.

       If you do not supply any plain text passwords to encrypt on the command line then dircproxy-crypt, when run, will ask you for one on  stan-
       dard  input.   It  will display the encrypted version of each password, created using your system's crypt(3) function and a random salt, on
       standard output.

OPTIONS

       -h     Displays a brief help message detailing the command-line arguments, then exits.

       -v     Displays the dircproxy version number that this version of dircproxy-crypt comes with, then exits.

SEE ALSO

       dircproxy(1) crypt(3)

BUGS

       Please submit and review bug reports at:

       http://bugzilla.dircproxy.net/

AUTHOR

       Written by Scott James Remnant <scott@netsplit.com>.

COPYRIGHT

       Copyright (C) 2002 Scott James Remnant.	All Rights Reserved.  dircproxy is distributed under the GNU General Public License.

								    11 Jan 2001 						dircproxy-crypt(1)