• There are tools which need user provided credentials for talking to remote services.
  
• The tool should be able to register that it would like all credentials under a certain namespace (e.g. a tool in my apollo suite would want all credentials under the "apollo" path). E.g. in a tool:
  
• The command block uses something like "<command>my_script.sh $apollo_password</command>"
• The inputs contains something like '<input><input type="credentials" /></input>'
• And perhaps somewhere else in the tool we have '<credentials><input type="text" label="Service Username" /><input type="text" label="Service Password"/></credentials>
• Galaxy, upon seeing the credentials block, would expose a user configuration setting, allowing the user to register as many services as they want with this form for entering credentials.
• The tool, upon looking through the user's configured credentials in Galaxy, would allow the user to select which credentials they wish to use.
  

I am not tackling the encryption portion too heavily, credentials would be encrypted with the galaxy id_secret going into the database (and probably salted as well), and then exposed as environment variables orso when the job is constructed. Anything past that is increasingly less important for me, any sys admin running Galaxy has access to do much more malicious things anyway.

There are a couple of specifics I still need to work out (mostly syntax things for how tools should declare these variables, and how they should consume them) but I think this would be a much more generic option and allow for more exciting things in the future. This is what I envision people selecting in the UI.

Hi Everyone,

I know this is sort of a controversial topic so I will try to tread lightly. It seems that for a couple of years the idea of a password parameter for Galaxy tools has come up a lot but has also been rejected a lot although I believe there is a lot of merit to it. I have found at least two other times where people have tried to implement this and it was rejected, but there must have been a reason why they needed that parameter. My situation currently is that I have created two tools in Galaxy which communicate with another software called iRODS which needs authentication from the user. In my own department, there is another tool that was created which needed authentication from the user but the developer had to create some other workaround for this problem. 

In terms of the work I have done for this so far, I have been working off the latest release version of Galaxy. I have implemented the field so that it is obfuscated in the tool form view as well as on the tool info page. I will next be looking into storing the parameter in an environment variable so it doesn't get passed through the command line and encrypting the password before it enters the database. Speaking with a co-worker of mine, we discussed the possibility of implementing two option, irreversible encryption of the password as it gets entered into the database but then making the tool not workflow compatible, or using regular encryption and making the tool workflow compatible. I look forward to hearing your opinions and ideas.

Katherine

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