Using the PSCipher Utility

The PSCipher feature encrypts and decrypts text used in your PeopleSoft system. System administrators interact with PSCipher through a Java, command line utility located on the web server, which enables you to encrypt text, such as user IDs and passwords, stored in configuration files. PSCipher also involves a runtime element, running on the application server, that decrypts the encrypted text. The runtime element requires no user interaction.

In previous releases, PSCipher was used, for example, to secure the node IDs and node passwords used in conjunction with PeopleSoft Integration Broker configurations. You can now use the PSCipher command line utility to encrypt (AES) a variety of text values stored in various configuration files throughout your system. In addition, PSCipher also provides:

• Key generation: Generate a new key using PSCipher command line utility.

• Version maintenance: The key file maintains a version history of all previous versions of the key file, which enables text encrypted with a previous version to be decrypted.

To encrypt text, you submit text values in the form of arguments that PSCipher encrypts and then displays in its encrypted form. Suppose you needed to encrypt a user ID of "HRDMO" and a password of "DMOPSWD". You would submit these values to PSCipher as follows:

...\pscipher HRDMO

and

...\pscipher DMOPSWD

PSCipher returns the encrypted form of these submitted text values, which you can then copy to a configuration file to assign to a configuration parameter.