How safe is storing Safari passwords in the device?

The keychain is only readable if you supply your password (and thereby unlock it). The file itself is encrypted. You can copy it to another machine, but if you try to open it then it will prompt you for a password. Without this, you can try reading through the file's contents, but you will get garbled information.

Passwords are stored in your keychain, which is an encrypted storage platform for secured notes and passwords. These can be managed through Apple's Keychain Access utility in your Applications > Utilities folder. This means that they will be very difficult to crack by anyone who steals your system or otherwise tries to crack your password, but the security of this system is only as good as the password you use, so be sure to use a strong and unique password.

You could generate and store all of your passwords, credit card information, secure notes, etc., using 1Password - it's a bit pricey but is terrific for password protection and generation.

Clinton

The keychain itself is encrypted with Triple DES. It's quite secure. A couple articles if you want to read:

http://www.macworld.com/article/2013756/how-to-manage-passwords-with-keychain-ac cess.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_DES

1Password is no more secure than Keychain; it just be may more convenient for some uses.

The keychain file is encrypted with a Triple DES algorithm that should make brute-force attacks (guessing) nearly impossible to do. While someone with administrative access to your system can run programs to pull keychain information from memory, this ability is limited to those with admin access. Therefore, the security of the system is limited to who you grant access and the strength of the passwords you use. If I were to guess at how long it would take a system to brute-force attack the keychain and guess the password, provided a good password is used it would take well over a million years.

Exactly. The keychain will require its master password in order to unlock all of its contained password.

If you are worried about someone doing this and getting any of your data, then in addition you can enable FileVault in the Security system preferences, which will result in all files being encrypted. Therefore if anyone takes out your drive and puts it in another system they will see nothing but garbled data.

FileVault performance hit is negligeable. You likely won't even notice it is on. I didn't.

Where do you get the idea it will reduce disk operation speed "greatly?"

This hardly looks like a great hit in pereformance: http://osxdaily.com/2011/08/10/filevault-2-benchmarks-disk-encryption-faster-mac -os-x-lion/

The passwords in Keychain are encrypted. They can't be read anywhere without the password. Hence the term, encryption.