There is no one size fits all answer. In general you have the choices of carefully protected plaintext storage in a secure location (ideal for fully automated processes) or encrypted data protected with a passphrase you enter when you login interactively.

In a fully automated environment, your system needs all info sufficient to access the plain text so if the computer is compromised the system has enough information to access the plain text no matter what you do.

On the other hand for interactive workloads, you can use AES (see Crypt::OpenSSL::AES) to encrypt the passwords with a passphrase you enter.

You might also consider measures outside your application and use full disk encryption.

In reply to Re: Best way to store passwords by einhverfr
in thread Best way to store passwords by Special_K

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