DBI and plain text passwords

[young perlhopper]

Does anybody know of any good mechanisms to avoid having plain text passwords in one's DBI code? Prompting for a password is not an option, as my code has to be able to run autonomously.

One solution I thought of was writing a daemon (or using a pre-existing one if this wheel's already been invented) to listen on a port, perform some type of authentication against incoming connections (presumably involving a non-worldreadable key or password file), and then make itself into a bridge between the remote host and the MySQL server. In this instance, mysql would only allow connections from the localhost, so one would be required to go through this proxy daemon. Please note that I haven't thought about the details involved in this scheme, or even decided if it is secure or possible.

I'm sure other people have run into this problem, how have they dealt with it? My main goal here is that i don't want to have plain text passwords in my code *or* going across my network.

Thanks!
Mark