A direct, end-to-end way to migrate Web and Windows user credentials from the Windows Credential Manager (WCM) into Proton Pass is a practical and secure approach.

A system that bypasses these intermediaries requires a secure pipeline that extracts, translates, and cryptographically encapsulates the data locally before injecting it into the Proton Pass ecosystem.

Windows Credential Manager distinguishes between Generic credentials (where passwords are retrievable via the Win32 CredEnumerate/CredRead API by the owning user) and Domain/Web credentials (where passwords are often opaque even to the owning user through the API).

To programmatically extract these credentials without a third-party application, the system could utilise low-level system calls via "advapi32.dll".

Specifically, the system would invoke the "CredEnumerate function". This function retrieves an array of pointers to "CREDENTIAL" structures. The system must account for different credential typologies:

• "CREDTYPEGENERIC": Typically used for custom application tokens and certain web credentials.

• "CREDTYPEDOMAIN_PASSWORD": Utilised for Active Directory or local Windows user account credentials.