Storing/Creating User Profiles

Question

I've been looking for a way to store user specific data, the data needs to be securely stored so only the user who knows their username and password can access the data.

Each profile will have financial data stored against them and they will have to options to personalise how they view this data. So far I have been eyeing up storing such data in XML format.

To summarise: How can I securely store varying amounts of custom user data?

Answer 1

The Windows way to do it: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/3ak841sy%28v=vs.80%29.aspx

If you combine this with encryption you should be pretty safe...

Answer 2

Depends on the level of security you want to achieve. The basics is to use the user AppData directory; I would strongly advice to encrypt data using at least the .NET/Windows provided algorithm (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.io.file.encrypt.aspx)