"IBM WebSphere applies a hardcoded XOR. Each caracter is XOR'd with the caracter ‘_’, and the resulting string is encoded in base64. This is not cryptography, it is just enough encoding so that a casual glance at the file will not reveal the password."
I'm sure there are many different options. Key point here is the 'casual glance' reference. In terms of adding additional overhead when a node starts up ... it shouldn't be that prohibitive. when the cassandra.yaml is loaded in and the "encryption_properties", if keystore_password.clear or truststore_password.clear exists, rewrite these properties in the yaml to the encrypted values of the cleartext string, removing the ".clear" suffix and continue on as normal. the default within cassandra should be looking at decrypting an encrypted value. if the decrypted values are wrong, throw an error as you would normally ... Yes, all of this can be circumvented if the cassandra.yaml is set to read only for user and no one else, but really ... do i want anyone in our organization who may have access to restart a cassandra node, but may not be privileged to know what the keystore / truststore passwords are to easily find out by looking at the cassandra.yaml ? -sd > On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 5:09 AM, David Strauss <da...@davidstrauss.net> wrote: > > If the passwords are encrypted, when and how would they be decrypted?
