Storing passwords in records/Authenticating IOC with other servers

[Marco Filho via Tech-talk <tech-talk@aps.anl.gov>]

Hi, all

I am creating an epics ADDriver that needs to communicate and authenticate with another server. The authentication requires a password and a username.
Since I want everything to be as dynamic as possible, I wanted to create a record to use the password to authenticate, but I don't feel comfortable only protecting the record with ASG because it feels like a thin layer of protection.

I tried making an asynOctetWrite record that passes a value to MYDriver::writeOctet() without storing the value passed. In other words: something that would behave like:

caput MY_RECORD PASS
(Function MYDriver::writeOctet gets called with PASS passed as an argument to the function)
caget MY_RECORD
MY_RECORD                          #Shows nothing, nothing is actually stored in the record.

But I could not succeed in making this record only with asyn. The best solution I can think of now is reading the password from a file which again doesn't seem like the optimal solution.

This is probably not a too specific problem, so I'm wondering if there is already any elegant solution for that? Can anyone think of a better approach? Or maybe an already-existing record that does something similar?

Thanks for any suggestions,

Marco