Re: Storing sensitive data indefinitely in variables or buffers: Whether and how to fix?

[Adam Porter <adam@alphapapa.net>]

I've recently been thinking about similar issues.  In Ement.el, it's 
necessary to store a session token, which is used upon next connection 
to prevent having to log in with a password again (the Matrix protocol 
does not intend for users to re-enter their password on each 
connection).  For now, the token is stored in a plain-text file with 
permissions set securely, but obviously it would be good for the token 
to be encrypted at rest.

I once attempted to use the auth-source library to store it, but due to 
numerous problems[0], I gave up on that idea.

Since then we've gained the `persist' and `multisession' libraries, 
which seem like good tools, but neither one offers secure storage.

I think Emacs needs a new library to store Lisp data securely.  Ideally 
the API would simply return a Lisp object which could be used with 
common functions like alist-get, gethash, etc. to read data.  For 
writing, perhaps some kind of simple macro or function wrapper that 
would store the data securely, as-configured, without the application 
needing to know the details.

Even more ideally, such a feature would be part of `persist' and/or 
`multisession', or at least be built on top of them, to avoid having 
yet-another data-persistence library.

(I also hope we can figure out the situation with regard to having both 
`persist' and `multisession' now; I asked[1] last month, but the 
discussion didn't proceed very far.)

Does anyone else have thoughts about this?

Thanks,
Adam

0: 
https://old.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/8lvda6/is_authsource_from_the_dark_side/
1: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2023-04/msg00269.html