On the Security view, you can specify credentials that enable the crawlers to access data sources. The credentials are stored in a common location, called a credential vault.
The credential vault is a repository in which all of the crawler target information and the credentials for crawling the target data sources are federated into one file. By having this information in one location, crawlers on different servers in a multiple server environment can all access the credentials that they need to access a data source.
The identity management component refers to the credential vault to obtain information that it needs to access secure data sources. The credential vault includes information about whether document-level security is enabled for the data source and, if so, whether current user credentials need to be validated when users search the collection.
Search servers also access the credential vault when determining whether the user must be prompted to provide credentials and when post-filtering the search results to ensure that documents that the user is not authorized to see are excluded.
To configure data source connection credentials:
You can edit the connection credentials if requirements for accessing a data source change. For example, you might need to update a password or change information about a proxy server.