Simpler authentication options

[StijnvWijn]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
I am looking into labelling/active learning solutions for my medical imaging data and for security purposes I would like to have some basic authentication required for access. I was looking into the monailabel authentication options and as far as I see currently only username/password authentication is enabled using an external password database. However, for my simple use case (only a couple of users) this is kind of overkill, quite some work to set up and requires other dependencies I would rather avoid.

Describe the solution you'd like
I would like to specify some user/password combinations for authentication directly in the monailabel app config (similar to the fastapi example)

Describe alternatives you've considered
I could set up the third-party authentication service
I could stay with my manual workflow

Additional context
I am not a security expert, so if you have specific reasons for not allowing direct authentication in monailabel, please let me know.
If you agree with (a modified version of) my solution, I would be more than happy to make a PR.

[diazandr3s]

Hi @StijnvWijn,

Thank you for your suggestion. MONAI Label was intentionally designed to integrate with external tools for user management and authentication. This is because each user may have their own set of annotated or corrected images, and tracking this per user adds significant complexity. By keeping user management as a separate layer, we ensure better scalability, security, and maintainability.

[StijnvWijn]

Hi @diazandr3s
Thanks for your reply!

That makes a lot of sense, I have indeed noticed in the meanwhile how much complexity this adds in my own fork, so I'll close this suggestion.