Steps to create, open and close an Oracle Wallet using Oracle Wallet Manager

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It's possible to create the Oracle Wallet using the owm gui utility or from sqlplus with a new set of key management statements (ADMINISTER KEY MANAGEMENT).

Let's see first in this post how to proceed using the owm gui utility.
Using the Oracle Wallet Manager it's possible to create standard wallets (PKCS #12, Public-Key Cryptography Standards) on file system or
wallets (PKCS #11) used in conjunction of hardware security modules (HSM), tokens or smart cards.

From the command line type:

[oracle@vsi08devpom ~]$ owm &

The following screenshot appears:



















To create a new wallet from the Wallet menu select New. If the Oracle software detects you don't have a default directory for the wallet it will ask you to create one: you can always choose a custom directory. The default path of the wallet directory is: $ORACLE_HOME/owm/wallets/user_name (/app/oracle/product/12.1.0/dbhome_1/owm/wallets/oracle in my case).
 

In the next dialog box you are prompted to set a password, having a minimum of eight characters, containing alphabetic characters and numbers or special characters.


As you can see on the following alert a new empty wallet has been created. If you need to add also a certificate request select Yes, otherwise to simply return to the Oracle Wallet Manager main window select No as I have done.


From the Oracle Wallet Manager main window you can see the new wallet in the left pane. It's time to save the wallet: from the Wallet menu select "Save In System Default"

If the wallet is successfully saved the following message is displayed at the bottom of the window:

Only when you save the new wallet you can find it under the specified directory.

[oracle@localhost oracle]$ pwd
/app/oracle/product/12.1.0/dbhome_1/owm/wallets/oracle
[oracle@localhost oracle]$ ls
cwallet.sso  cwallet.sso.lck  ewallet.p12  ewallet.p12.lck

If you want to close the wallet from the graphical user interface of the Oracle Wallet Manager, start again it and from Wallet menu of the main window select Close.

If you want to open again the wallet, from Wallet menu of the main window select Open and then enter the path of the wallet. When prompted enter the right password.

That's all.