FWIW, it's still better that the thing you save is a hash, because that's less useful for cracking other related passwords than the raw password itself. E.g.

FWIW, it's still better that the thing you save is a hash, because that's less useful for cracking other related passwords than the raw password itself. E.g. If you make your password to access your home computer "eb49wsrew-home" ... what are the odds that the password for your work computer is "eb49wsrew-work"? In an ideal world passwords would be independently selected, but we write software for non-ideal users in a non-ideal world. > So my question would be: Describe the scenario where a bad actor has the ability to arbitrarily read data within a user's execution context, but not manipulate the TeamViewer Client also running in that same user's context? Because I got nothing. If there was a system service which you could hand a read only secret and then it could perform challenge response queries of the form response = H(secret||challenge), and had the server send a fresh random challenge on every every connection then you could have a setup where even if the attacker could run as teamviewer (but not the system admin) he couldn't steal the credential he could only make use of it. When you save your credential you'd hash the password, the server would also store the same hashed password. You'd send the hashed password to the system service, and the server could challenge your knowledge of it. For bonus points, have the service implement some simple ZKP (such as SRP) so being able to observe the challenge-responses doesn't allow you to grind offline attack the password. This would be at least a small improvement.