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Power Platform Community / Forums / Power Automate / Sensitive Text - how i...
Power Automate
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Sensitive Text - how is it stored? Does not seem to move from one PC to another.

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Posted on by 26

I have PC dedicated to run PAD production flows (unattended). I have a similar PC I use to develop mods or new PAD flows. In my flows I often run an Excel Add-in that requires a password to authenticate to a cloud service. PAD handles this quite well, allowing me to "Populate text field in window" where I specify the text as "Direct sensitive input" so the password is not visible to anyone who might access the flow. Works great. However, when I am ready to run my newly developed flow on the Production PC the flow stops on the populating of the PW field step, forcing me to re-enter the password, save the flow and rerun. It works from that point onward. Same issue if I try to run a "production" flow on my development PC - I must reenter the "Direct sensitive input" before the flow will run. Is there any way around this? I would like to be able to run the flows unmodified on both the production and development PCs... 

 

Appreciate any guidance... 

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  • Verified answer
    Community Power Platform Member Profile Picture
    Microsoft Employee on at

    You can be able to use the Sensitive text only on the machine where you design the flow. When you try to run the flow in some other machine, the sensitive text wont populate there. To solve this there are two ways.

     

    1. Open the flow in the machine where you execute it and save the sensitive text.

    2. You can use Key Vault service by Microsoft where you can create vault and save the passwords securely. In PWD you need to create a input variable to be populated in the password field. That the same time in Flow designer you need to call the key(Password) saved in the vault from MS Key Vault connector and map this to the input variable you created. 

  • bpearce Profile Picture
    26 on at

    @Anonymous - thanks for the suggestion. Looks promising. However it also looks a bit intimidating. Thus far I am living with the limitation of re-entering passwords every time a new flow is used on a new PC. 

  • AshleyPettit Profile Picture
    40 on at

    Hey Bpearce,

     

    One option to avoid having the password stored in the cloud is to call a .txt file online. 

     

    1. Save the password to a location you like as a .txt file 

    2. You can save this to a secure location such as a google drive

    3. Fetch the password by downloading the .txt file

    4. Use "Read text from File" and read the password and store as %Password%

    5. Enter the password as %Password%

    6. Delete the local copy of the password.

     

    Encryption


    1. You can encrypt this if you like using a pgp keypair. 

    2. To decrypt either call the vault you're using or you can parse the private key yourself

    3. The limitation is for A grade security you'd need to store the private key on the local machine rather than storing on the google drive. Parsing a private key over the internet introduces risk.

  • bpearce Profile Picture
    26 on at

    Great suggestions. Thanks for responding.

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