gnome-keyring auto login

[Herr Oswald <herr_oswald gmx de>]

Hi,

hopefully this is not really old stuff, endlessly discussed and finally
 dismissed...
 
I'd like to use auto login on my ubuntu, beliving that my house door
lock is safe enough... (;  But I do not want to have crucial passwords
unencrypted, so I cannot do it. And when I google "gnome keyring" -
many people are struggling with that issue. 

This made me think whether the encryption of saved passwords
necessarily has to be linked to a typed-in password. Aren't there other
solutions?

I'm not a security specialist at all, so this can only be a sketch:

 * save the hashed password in a special place in the computer (e.g.
   USB stick, only mounted once at startup, then unmounted)?
 * get the password from a signed/encrypted hardware dongle (home-made
   old USB stick)?
 * create a long list of hardware related strings (MAC of the NIC,
   serial of motherboard or video card, various UUIDs, all the cryptic
   interrupts dmesg shows at startup etc), ask the user to choose one
   of them (or choose one randomly) - and implement a mechanism which
   only accepts 3 passwords at a time and then blocks the system for a
   few hours or so?

I guess, security specialists can produce better ideas than I can...

To boil down my thought again:
Is it really true that there are only the alternatives 
 * "password encrypted keyring" or 
 * "unencrypted keyring" - 
or could there be a smart and pretty save "in-between" with a password,
smart and safely stored on the computer?

Cheers,
Wolf