001/*
002 * Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more
003 * contributor license agreements. See the NOTICE file distributed with
004 * this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership.
005 * The ASF licenses this file to You under the Apache license, Version 2.0
006 * (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with
007 * the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at
008 *
009 *      http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
010 *
011 * Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
012 * distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
013 * WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
014 * See the license for the specific language governing permissions and
015 * limitations under the license.
016 */
017package org.apache.logging.log4j.core.net.ssl;
018
019/**
020 * PasswordProvider implementations are able to produce a password from somewhere. The source of the password data
021 * is implementation-specific.
022 * <p>The {@link #getPassword()} method may be called multiple times as needed, so the
023 * caller does not need to (and <b>should not</b>) keep the password data in memory for longer than absolutely
024 * necessary. Users of this class should erase the password array by calling
025 * {@link java.util.Arrays#fill(char[], char)} immediately when authentication is complete and the password data
026 * is no longer needed.
027 * </p>
028 */
029public interface PasswordProvider {
030
031    /**
032     * Returns a new char[] array with the password characters.
033     * <p>
034     * It is the responsibility of the caller to erase this data by calling
035     * {@link java.util.Arrays#fill(char[], char)} immediately when authentication is complete and the password data
036     * is no longer needed.
037     * </p>
038     * @return a copy of the password
039     */
040    char[] getPassword();
041}