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it is the plugins responsibility to declare the bean that is implementing the above interface with in that plugin. Please refer   (1) to know how to add a new plugin to cloudstack

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Currently The integration points are at plugins those implement UserAuthenticator wile encoding a given password.

1. plugins/user-authenticators/sha256salted
2. plugins/user-authenticators/plaintext
3. plugins/user-authenticators/md5

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<bean id="SHA256SaltedUserAuthenticator" class="com.cloud.server.auth.SHA256SaltedUserAuthenticator">
      <property name="name" value="SHA256SALT"/>
      <property name="passwordCheckers" value="#{passwordCheckersRegistry.registered}"/>
</bean>

Default Plugin

cloudstack gives the following default plugin to support password checker which gets registered with Extension Registry.

plugins/security/password-checker.

It has the following bean declaration in spring-password-checker.xml

<bean id="passwordChecker" class="org.apache.cloudstack.security.password.PasswordCheckerImpl">
         <property name="name" value="DEFAULTPASSWORDCHECKER"/>
        <!-- Comment any of the below sections you want modify if you are having requirements which are differing with default values -->
        <!-- property name="minLength" value="8"/ -->
        <!-- property name="maxLength" value="16"/ -->
        <!-- property name="passwordCheckerPropertiesFile" value="password-checker.properties"/ -->
</bean>

It has the following property file to change the password strength rules.

1. password-checker.properties
   The following is the format of the file where each rule will be added in a separate line.
   pattern,optional
   pattern - Pattern to support in the password character set. Eg: @!#$%
   optional - Whether this password rule set is optional or not while enforcing the password strength 

The password strength is calculated based on the following algorithm:

1. Password Entropy = (log (N) * L ) / log (2)
   where L is the Length of the password
    and N is the total Length of the all character sets to be involved. 

References

 (1 )  http://ianduffy.ie/cloudstack/CreatingAPlugin.pdf