Store Password for Third party login

Question

I am attempting to create a Soft-phone application in .NET C# and I've hit a wall when it comes to storing username and passwords in the application. I've thought about using SQL Server but since I'm not comfortable with storing the password in plaintext, I'm wondering what other options there are out there for me to accomplish this. Here are my constraints while developing this program:

• Must securely store username and password information
• It Cannot hash the password as the password needs to be sent to another server to authenticate with.
• Login information must persist between executions of the program. User should only have to save their login information once when they first run the program, then each time the program loads afterwards, it should automatically load the user info and authenticate with the server without prompting the user for the password again.
• Database is embedded within the application itself so it will be locally stored on the users computer.

This is the first time I've played with the idea of implementing a database function with C#. Any suggestions or recommendations are welcome. I'm more familiar with using SQL, but if there's an alternate database out there that would work better with what I'm trying to do, I'm willing to try it out.

Answer 1

The requirements you listed appear to be met by the Windows Credential Manager. See Storing Credentials in Credential Manager Service