It is desirable to provide a secure search mechanism to provide for searching over any and all content, such as across an enterprise. A secure search, however, requires access to the secure content repositories holding the data to be searched. In some cases the credentials required to crawl a repository may be extremely sensitive, or the user may be reluctant or unwilling to store user identification information in memory or on disk for any longer than is absolutely necessary. An approach is provided that allows a user or an administrator to provide security credentials to be stored and used only during a crawl, and to erase the credentials from the system when the crawl is complete.