It would still seem that the OSX/iOS keychain access is miles ahead of other platforms. (I was very impressed to learn that on iOS, you can mark a file with var

It would still seem that the OSX/iOS keychain access is miles ahead of other platforms. (I was very impressed to learn that on iOS, you can mark a file with various data protection flags, which encrypts the file on flash, and only allows open when the screen is unlocked (because the encryption key is derived from the screen-lock unlock code, and purged from memory immediately at screen lock time)). See for example http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#DOCUMENTATION/Cocoa/Reference/Foundation/Classes/NSFileManager_Class/Reference/Reference.html#//apple_ref/c/data/NSFileProtectionComplete http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#DOCUMENTATION/Cocoa/... Does desktop linux, android or windows provide similar facilities where the keys are actually not available for reading by processes running under the user's UID? I found http://stackoverflow.com/questions/442923/windows-equivalent-of-os-x-keychain http://stackoverflow.com/questions/442923/windows-equivalent... which sort of hints on some win32 APIs providing something like this, but with very high overhead (and also links to scary blogposts about weakened crypto in i18n'ed windows releases!)