Windows 8 Will Save Passwords in the Cloud

A tireless Steven Sinofsky, the man in charge of Windows 8, keeps posting information about Windows 8 by the slice.

The latest piece details Microsoft's idea how to better protect your PC with passwords stored in the cloud as well as an infrastructure that will not lock you out when you either forget your password or someone else takes over your PC.

The solution is an approach with a password-manager-style credential manager which will enable users to store passwords for Windows in a similar way browsers do today. Just like IE10 will store account names and passwords for visited websites, Metro apps can use a direct API to store and retrieve credentials for that app. Windows 8 itself will support a sign-on via a Windows Live ID, which stores passwords in the cloud and synchronizes those passwords in an environment that is defined as "Trusted PCs" by the user.

While there may always be questions over the security of "the cloud," Microsoft said that Windows Live ID passwords can make your password management much more convenient. For example, if you forget your local password you may be out of luck and will have to start from scratch (or use a password cracking tool). The cloud approach, however, allows a user to reset a password from another PC. If your password has been stolen, you can recover your account access via secondary authentication data, such as a mobile phone number. Also, Microsoft said, users will be able to sign in to their Windows, as the software caches the your last “known good” sign-in password.