KeyControl

KeyControl is a Ruby wrapper for the keyctl commands available on most Linux systems. It provides a Hash-like API for storing and retrieving data using the kernel's built-in key management facilities.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'key_control'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install key_control

Usage

Availability

You can check if KeyControl is supported on your system with KeyControl.available?. This will attempt to locate a libkeyutils shared library on the system, and return a boolean based on detection.

Key Storage/Retrieval

The basic API consists of a single class, KeyControl::KeyRing. The KeyRing initializer takes a single argument, the ID of the keyring you wish to store your data in. There are several (very useful) special keyrings, which are available for use as constants in the KeyControl module.

As an example, we'll create a basic accessor for the session keyring (useful for sharing information among several grouped processes):

keyring = KeyControl::KeyRing.new(KeyControl::SESSION)

Once you have your keyring instance, just add and fetch values like you would with any regular Hash:

keyring["mykey"] = "my passphrase"
keyring["mykey"]
# => "my passphrase"

That's it! The power of this gem is the ability to use your kernel's built-in key management mechanism to share information between Ruby processes, without exposing your data to the outside world.

Contributing