Possible to get cleartext password?

Question

I have hosting service hosted on more than 20+ Plesk servers, version 11. As in the previous versions, the passwords were not encrypted, then if i had to design some tools to manage the hosting accounts, i just picked up the cleartext passwords from the Database. but as now the passwords are encrypted, is there any way i can decrypt the passwords? through API or any other way so that i can integrate my php based hosting management with plesk 11?

Answer 1

Why not just figure out what hashing algorithm Plesk uses, and replicate that functionality in your PHP application? You don't need the un-ecrypted version of a password to authenticated against it, and you never really want to store a password in the clear, or with a reversible encryption.

Answer 2

Theoretically, if the program can get the encryption password, yes, you can get back the password in plain text.
EDIT: added decryption code.

function decrypt_password($pass,$key)
{

$base64encoded_ciphertext = $pass;

$res_non = mcrypt_decrypt(MCRYPT_RIJNDAEL_128, $key, base64_decode($base64encoded_ciphertext), ‘ecb’);

$decrypted = $res_non;
$dec_s2 = strlen($decrypted);

$padding = ord($decrypted[$dec_s2-1]);
$decrypted = substr($decrypted, 0, -$padding);

return  $decrypted;
}