Secret Memory

secret-mem is a Rust library designed to securely manage sensitive data in memory. It provides safe abstractions for allocating, managing, and deallocating memory regions that should remain protected and as invisible as possible using platform-specific features. The goal of the library is to ensure that sensitive data, such as passwords, cryptographic keys, or confidential information, are kept secure in memory, reducing the risk of leakage or exposure.

The library will use operating system-specific mechanisms like memfd_secret, mmap, and VirtualAlloc to provide memory protections, including:

Preventing memory from being swapped to disk.
Restricting read/write access to allocated memory regions.
Ensuring memory is excluded from core dumps.

Important: This project is still under development and is currently non-functional!

While the foundation of the library is in place, key functionality, such as memory protections and platform-specific implementations, are not yet fully implemented or tested.

Example (Currently Non-functional)

use secret_mem::{SecretBox, SecretVec, SecretString};

fn main() {
    // Example: Store a single secret value
    let secret_value: SecretBox<u64> = SecretBox::new(42);

    // Example: Store multiple secret values in a secure vector
    let mut secret_vec: SecretVec<u8> = SecretVec::new();
    secret_vec.push(0x42);
    secret_vec.push(0x43);

    // Example: Store a sensitive string in secure memory
    let secret_password: SecretString = SecretString::from("super_secret_password");

    // NOTE: None of the above functionality is currently working!
}

Development Status

secret-mem is an experimental project and is currently incomplete. The main structures, SecretBox, SecretVec, and SecretString, have been defined, but they lack proper implementation and memory management features at this time.

Roadmap

Implement platform-specific memory allocation and protection features.
- Improve memory management.
Partial ~~Complete~~ functionality for SecretBox.
Complete functionality for SecretVec.
Complete functionality for SecretString.
Add tests for memory safety.

Safety & Security

The library will use unsafe code internally to interact with system memory management functions. Handle your sensitive data with extreme care.

License

This project is licensed under either of the following licenses, at your option:

Apache License, Version 2.0, (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

Contribution

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.