Encodes the specified raw password with an implementation specific algorithm.
This will generally be a one-way message digest such as MD5 or SHA, but may also be a plaintext variant which does no encoding at all, but rather returns the same password it was fed. The latter is useful to plug in when the original password must be stored as-is.
The specified salt will potentially be used by the implementation to "salt" the initial value before encoding. A salt is usually a user-specific value which is added to the password before the digest is computed. This means that computation of digests for common dictionary words will be different than those in the backend store, because the dictionary word digests will not reflect the addition of the salt. If a per-user salt is used (rather than a system-wide salt), it also means users with the same password will have different digest encoded passwords in the backend store.
If a salt value is provided, the same salt value must be use when calling the {@link #isPasswordValid(String,String,Object)} method. Note that a specific implementation may choose to ignore thesalt value (via null
), or provide its own.
@param rawPass the password to encode
@param salt optionally used by the implementation to "salt" the raw password before encoding. A
null
value is legal.
@return encoded password