PDI Password Encryption

  03 Mar 2017


Encrypting a password in PDI

For database connections as well as various other sensistive accounts encrypting the password instead of storing it in plain-text within e.g. properties files is advisable. PDI ships with a handy encryption tool which is very easy to use:

$ ./encr.sh -kettle '<your-password>'

Note: Enclose your password in single quotation mark so any special characters do not get interpreted by the shell.

This command will return the encrypted password.

You get the general usage info by just typing:

$ ./encr.sh
encr usage:

  encr <-kettle|-carte> <password>
  Options:
    -kettle: generate an obfuscated password to include in Kettle XML files
    -carte : generate an obfuscated password to include in the carte password file 'pwd/kettle.pwd'

Example: Encrypting password test:

$ ./encr.sh -kettle test
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM warning: ignoring option MaxPermSize=256m; support was removed in 8.0
19:53:07,542 INFO  [KarafBoot] Checking to see if org.pentaho.clean.karaf.cache is enabled
19:53:07,663 INFO  [KarafInstance] 
*******************************************************************************
*** Karaf Instance Number: 1 at /Applications/Development/pdi-ce-7.0/./syst ***
***   em/karaf/caches/encr/data-1                                           ***
*** Karaf Port:8802                                                         ***
*** OSGI Service Port:9051                                                  ***
*******************************************************************************
Mar 02, 2017 7:53:08 PM org.apache.karaf.main.Main$KarafLockCallback lockAquired
INFO: Lock acquired. Setting startlevel to 100
Encrypted 2be98afc86aa7f2e4cb79ce10ca97bcce

The encrypted password in this case is:

Encrypted 2be98afc86aa7f2e4cb79ce10ca97bcce

Note: Make sure you include Encrypted when specifying the password!

How to decrypt the password for steps that don’t support it natively

Within PDI Database connections decrypt passwords natively, however, steps, like e.g. the HTTP step, don’t dycrypt an encrypted password automatically. The work-around for this is to use a UDJE (User Defined Java Expression).

Create a new field within the UDJE step called decrypted_password and add this Java snippet:

import org.pentaho.di.core.encryption.Encr;Encr.decryptPassword(encrypted_password)

encrypted_password in the code snipped above is an incoming field containing … well you guessed it.

How could you have found out about this function?

Just search the Pentaho Kettle Github repo:

https://github.com/pentaho/pentaho-kettle/search?utf8=✓&q=decryptPassword&type=Code

The idea is to create a dedicate transformation which uses a Get Variable step to get hold of the encrypted password variable, then you can use the User Defined Java Expression to decrypt the password and finally use a JavaScript step to set the variable:

setVariable("VAR_PW_DECRYPTED",decrypted_password,"r");

Important: Do not use the Set Variable step as it will print out the decrypted password to the log.

comments powered by Disqus