Checkmk Werk 13633: The password store is now storing passwords obfuscated

ID: 13633 Title: The password store is now storing passwords obfuscated Component: Core & setup Level: 2 Class: New feature Version: 2.1.0i1 The password stores primary use is to centralize stored credentials. Instead of spreading the credentials in the whole configuration, we have this as a central place for sensitive information. We are a monitoring system. We definitely need credentials in clear text to contact remote some systems all the time. And we also need to be able do this after restarting the whole system without user interaction (for providing some kind of master key). This means the secrets need to be available to the site user on disk in clear text. To underline this fact, we kept the password store file in clear text on disk for a long time. This approach made the situation clearly visible to everyone. We are faced with the requirement that no credential shall be stored in clear text on disk, they need to be encrypted. We'd love to have that too. But since securing is not possible, we are now "obfuscating". In fact it's encryption, but we are doing it with a secret that is stored in the same context as the password store itself - this is why we call it obfuscation. The best we can do in this case. With the development of Checkmk 2.2 we will evaluate the usage of HSMs as well as vault solutions in the future which may be helpful in some use cases. The password store file <tt>var/check_mk/stored_passwords</tt> is now encrypted using the new password store key (<tt>etc/password_store.secret</tt>). This key is created during update to Checkmk 2.1 automatically. You are free to replace the secret with what ever text you want. But please note that the password store needs to be initialized again after changing the secret. All existing passwords stores will be obfuscated automatically during update to Checkmk 2.1.