Special Characters in application password will break SSO authentication

When an application is configured in Crowd with SSO with a password that includes special characters such as \, the application authentication will fail. So far I've tested and confirmed that the characters !@#$%&*() do not seem to break the application authentication, however, using them may result in the behavior described in https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CWD-4243

The Crowd logs contain the following during the failed authentication:

2015-05-12 12:57:42,956 http-bio-8095-exec-25 INFO [plugin.rest.filter.BasicApplicationAuthenticationFilter] Invalid authentication for application with name 'jira641'

Steps to Reproduce:

1. Setup Crowd with SSO enabled
2. Setup JIRA to use Crowd (with SSO enabled). Use an application password like pass\word
3. Attempt to log into JIRA and observe login failure