Microsoft Edge keeps every saved password in process memory as cleartext from the moment it launches. Microsoft's responsed when reported: "by design."

All of them. Including credentials for sites you won't open this session.

Researcher
@L1v1ng0ffTh3L4N
tested every major Chromium browser. Edge is the only one that behaves this way.

Chrome decrypts credentials on demand, and App-Bound Encryption locks the keys to an authenticated Chrome process so other processes can't reuse them.

In Chrome, plaintext surfaces only during autofill or when a password is viewed, making memory scraping far less useful.

What makes this extra weird is that Edge still demands re-authentication before revealing those passwords in its Password Manager UI, while the same browser process already holds every one of them in plaintext.

In shared environments, this turns into a credential harvest. On a terminal server, an attacker with admin rights can read the memory of every logged-on user process. In the published PoC video, a compromised admin account lifts stored credentials from two other logged-on (and even disconnected) users with Edge running.

Microsoft's official response when notified: "by design."

The finding was disclosed April 29 at BigBiteOfTech by PaloAltoNtwks Norway, alongside a small educational tool that lets anyone verify the cleartext storage for themselves.