MemGuard

Software enclave for storage of sensitive information in memory.

---

This package attempts to reduce the likelihood of sensitive data being exposed when in memory. It aims to support all major operating systems and is written in pure Go.

Features

• Sensitive data is encrypted and authenticated in memory with XSalsa20Poly1305. The scheme used also defends against cold-boot attacks.
• Memory allocation bypasses the language runtime by using system calls to query the kernel for resources directly. This avoids interference from the garbage-collector.
• Buffers that store plaintext data are fortified with guard pages and canary values to detect spurious accesses and overflows.
• Effort is taken to prevent sensitive data from touching the disk. This includes locking memory to prevent swapping and handling core dumps.
• Kernel-level immutability is implemented so that attempted modification of protected regions results in an access violation.
• Multiple endpoints provide session purging and safe termination capabilities as well as signal handling to prevent remnant data being left behind.
• Side-channel attacks are mitigated against by making sure that the copying and comparison of data is done in constant-time.

Some features were inspired by libsodium, so credits to them.

Full documentation and a complete overview of the API can be found here. Interesting and useful code samples can be found within the examples subpackage.

Installation

$ go get github.com/awnumar/memguard

API is experimental and may have unstable changes. You should pin a version. [modules]

Contributing

• Submitting program samples to ./examples.
• Reporting bugs, vulnerabilities, and any difficulties in using the API.
• Writing useful security and crypto libraries that utilise memguard.
• Implementing kernel-specific/cpu-specific protections.
• Submitting performance improvements.

Issues are for reporting bugs and for discussion on proposals. Pull requests should be made against master.