Upgrade Planning for Siebel AES Encryption

Upgrades from: All Supported Siebel releases.

Environments: Development, Test and Production.

Databases: All databases.

Platforms: Windows and UNIX only.

Siebel CRM 7.7 introduced support for the AES encryption method, the government standard for secure applications. Siebel CRM no longer supports RC2 encryption but continues to support AES encryption.

Data that is unencrypted or that uses the standard encryptor (supported in some earlier releases) or RC2 cannot be read by the application in the current release so you must upgrade your encryption method to AES using the Encryption Upgrade Utility. Running the Encryption Upgrade Utility encrypts data that is unencrypted and increases the encryption level of data that is already encrypted. For more information about upgrading data to a higher encryption level, see Siebel Security Guide.

Attention: All encryption that is upgraded is upgraded to a minimum of 256 bits in Siebel CRM.

During the upgrade process, the encryption upgrade is run during the database upgrep and upgphys process. During the database upgrep upgrade, only the logical definition is updated. During the database upgphys process, only the physical data is updated. During the upghys encryption upgrade, the .cfg file could cause errors. The .cfg file must be updated correctly before running the Key Database Manager utility - for more information, see Modifying siebel.cfg Before Upgrading Siebel Database.

Note: After installing the Siebel CRM software for the current release, you must reset any passwords stored in the Siebel Gateway that were previously encrypted using RC4 encryption. In the current release, such passwords are encrypted using Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) instead of RC4. For more information about reencrypting passwords, see Siebel Security Guide.