We have a few VB.Net applications that connect to a SQL Server 2008 database using SQL Server authentication. Basically, we have a config file that contains an encrypted password, and our applications take that, decrypt it, and put the decrypted password in the connection string.

This obviously isn't completely secure, because if nothing else, when a developer is debugging the code he will be able to see the decrypted password.

So, my question is: is it possible to pass an encrypted password to SQL Server via the connection string and have it decrypted by SQL Server itself? I've seen a few comments about hashing a password, but I'm not sure that that would give me what I need (it's highly possible that I've fundamentally misunderstood the process, of course).

Any suggestions would be gratefully received.