Updated 30th March 2017 to reflect updated information (see comments), add additional links and add some clarifying text about why misuse-resistance is useful.
With the impending release of the ForgeRock Identity Platform, I thought I’d spend some time writing up a few of the bits of OpenAM 14 that I was directly involved with creating. One of my last acts before leaving FR to go solo, was to put in place the first phase of modernising AM’s aging system credential encryption scheme. Before I start, I should say that this encryption scheme is not used for encrypting user passwords (which are hashed by the LDAP user store, not AM). Instead, this scheme is used for encrypting various system credentials (passwords for SMTP servers, HMAC shared secrets, etc) in the config store and in exported system configurations and in a few other places.
The original (and still default) encryption method was first mentioned in Dante’s Inferno. Actually it dates from the original iPlanet codebase from the mid-90s, and uses correspondingly ancient cryptographic algorithms (MD5 and DES). It is best to regard it as providing only limited obfuscation of credentials, rather than any true security guarantees, and the advice has always been to secure the config store by traditional means (TLS, access controls) rather than rely on this encryption. Still, we can do much better than this now, so AM 14 ships with a new AESWrapEncryption scheme that provides significantly improved security:
Neil Madden 