How Google Chrome stores passwords

Well, I’ve been a bit hesitant to save passwords when using Google Chrome because it does not ask for a “Master Password” like Firefox does. So, I didn’t know if it encrypted the stored passwords, or if it did encrypt them, where it got the encryption key from. Then I found this article which looks at the source code for Chrome on Windows to see that it uses a Windows system call to encrypt the password using the user’s Windows password. Nice.

Which means that this is one component that they have to keep re-writing on various platforms to use whatever is native. Which is probably why Mozilla went with their own scheme.