Keyrings cryptographically secure your password in a way that would generally be more secure (although not perfect). It would require a master password, shared amongst all the applications on your computer, to get at your passwords.

Pidgin does not currently support storing passwords in keyrings; currently you must either store passwords unencrypted or not at all.

== Status ==

There was a Google Summer of Code [wiki:GSoC2008/MasterPassword project] that made progress in this direction, but the code was not merged into the main developer branch (im.pidgin.pidgin).

The GSoC branch has implementations for Freedesktop and KWallet.

== See also ==
* wiki:PlainTextPasswords
* The feature request is ticket #673
* [https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pidgin/+bug/75850 Launchpad bug]

== Specific keyrings ==

=== GNOME Keyring and KDE KSecretsService ===
Status: implemented but not integrated

These are the GNOME and KDE implementations of the [http://standards.freedesktop.org/secret-service/ Freedesktop Secret Service API], intended to provide a standard interface for Linux apps to store passwords and stuff.

Pidgin would need to connect to the DBus API to store and retrieve passwords. There are several libraries to do this, including [https://live.gnome.org/Libsecret libsecret] and [https://pypi.python.org/pypi/keyring python-keyring].

=== KDE KWallet ===
Status: implemented but not integrated

Currently uses its own API, but there has been discussion about replacing it with KSecretsService using the standard API.


=== KeePass ===
http://keepass.info/

Cross-platform, open-source password manager.

Integrating with Pidgin would involve either [http://keepass.info/help/v2/plugins.html writing a KeePass plug-in], or using one of the existing plugins that facilitate communicating with other apps. See for example [http://keefox.org/ KeeFox] (KeePass–Firefox bridge), which includes the [http://keefox.org/2010/12/02/keepassrpc-plugin-technical-overview/ KeePassRPC plugin].

=== Mac OS Keychain ===
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keychain_%28Mac_OS%29

[https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Security/Conceptual/keychainServConcepts/01introduction/introduction.html Apple's developer documentation for Keychain]