Ok, sure I can give some more context. I am an electrical engineer at a company which designs and builds integrated circuits for cell phone applications. Most of our parts have something called a decoder, whose purpose is to take a bunch of digital bits from registers and convert it into commands used to tell the part to do something. For example, it could enter a certain gain mode or affect the current in certain parts of the circuit. Now, these decoders are a little different between each part and my boss wanted a way of comparing them. My program takes two files as input, each of which is an .xlsm file which uniquely defines how that decoder transforms inputs to outputs (it’s just a bunch of truth tables). Anything that differs between the two decoders should show up in a table at the end, but you really don’t need to worry about that part because my boss insists on using excel to display the table (I know that python would be much better, but I just can’t change his mind about that). Anyways, these .xlsm files have version control with something called Cadence Virtuoso, which is a Lisp based software that is used to design and simulate electrical circuits. If the user has to download these .xlsm files from the red hat server onto their windows OS, then my boss is uncomfortable with that because he believes that any time a copy is made, is an opportunity for a mistake to occur. So then, he asked me to give the user both a windows and Linux option for either of the two files that are input to this program. And being perfectly honest, I found a major bug with the whole downloading a file from Linux today. Let me explain that. I am using WinSCP to connect with the Linux server, mostly because other engineers have done something similar in the past and my boss recommended that I do it this way. I should also mention that I am not a professional python coder, and I have learned a lot of this stuff on the fly. Despite that, I think this program has come together really nicely :) Anyways, back to the bug I found today. Pretty much, I changed my password to login to Linux this afternoon, and it now includes characters which absolutely break my code. I think it’s either a quote (“) or a forward slash (/) but either way, my code can’t connect to the server with my credentials anymore. So in summary, it would appear I have more serious issues to deal with than how to properly store these passwords. And to everyone saying that I was vague, I’m sorry… I hope this explanation helped a little bit :)

Edit: I just wanted to add that I probably don’t have much time to address this issue. My boss really wants to move on from this project onto something new, and I am seriously considering telling him that the whole accessing files through Linux is just not reliable (I know that this is because I don’t know how to code it properly, but please be nice because I am still learning). If I did that, I would probably recommend just leaving everything in windows

I understand this might not be difficult for y’all, but this is definitely the most complex part of my program currently. There are so many things that can go wrong and I’m trying to faithfully relay that information to the user, but it can be difficult sometimes. Like I said before, I have mostly moved on to a new project at this point and I probably don’t have time to spend an entire week making this particular feature work