How to validate a raw password against crowd encrypted ones?

[Emmanuel Koch]

Hello, I have integrated my own web apps with crowd. What I would like to have is an authentication fallback in case crowd is down. I plan to have a script to copy/sync the user password from the crowd database to my own application database. Once this is done, how can I validate a user password (send by my webapp) against the crowd encrypted one? Do you have any piece of code I could reuse?

[Caspar Krieger · Accepted solution]

We publish crowd-password-encoders as a reusable module for apps outside Crowd. You should just be able to depend on that (and a few other necessary libraries which that module assumes are provided) and use the password encoder classes directly.

I've put together a sample application which shows how to encode and validate passwords from outside Crowd: https://bitbucket.org/caspar-atlassian/crowd-password-encoder-sample-app (if anyone finds any problems with it, please raise them as BitBucket issues).

[Emmanuel Koch]

Very nice, it works easily! The PasswordEncoder interface is very close to the Spring one. Is there Spring Implementation in the spring integration module that directly implements the Spring PasswordEncoder interface?

[Caspar Krieger]

I vaguely recall possibly delegating to impls of Spring's PasswordEncoder interface in at least some cases? (check that rather than taking my word for it - you can download the Crowd source yourself from my.atlassian.com if you have a license.) Looking at the Spring PasswordEncoder docs, it is crazy similar, but we don't have direct implementations of the Spring PasswordEncoder interface that I know of: you'll have to do the tedious but trivial work of wrapping our impls yourself.