<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title>Secure Memory Containers — Botan</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="_static/agogo.css" type="text/css" />
<link rel="stylesheet" href="_static/pygments.css" type="text/css" />
<script type="text/javascript">
var DOCUMENTATION_OPTIONS = {
URL_ROOT: './',
VERSION: '1.10.17',
COLLAPSE_INDEX: false,
FILE_SUFFIX: '.html',
HAS_SOURCE: true
};
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="_static/jquery.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="_static/underscore.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="_static/doctools.js"></script>
<link rel="index" title="Index" href="genindex.html" />
<link rel="search" title="Search" href="search.html" />
<link rel="top" title="Botan" href="contents.html" />
<link rel="next" title="Key Derivation Functions" href="kdf.html" />
<link rel="prev" title="The Low-Level Interface" href="lowlevel.html" />
</head>
<body role="document">
<div class="header-wrapper">
<div class="header">
<h1>Botan</h1>
</div>
</div>
<div class="content-wrapper">
<div class="content">
<div class="document">
<div class="documentwrapper">
<div class="bodywrapper">
<div class="body" role="main">
<div class="section" id="secure-memory-containers">
<h1>Secure Memory Containers<a class="headerlink" href="#secure-memory-containers" title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h1>
<p>A major concern with mixing modern multiuser OSes and cryptographic
code is that at any time the code (including secret keys) could be
swapped to disk, where it can later be read by an attacker. Botan
stores almost everything (and especially anything sensitive) in memory
buffers that a) clear out their contents when their destructors are
called, and b) have easy plugins for various memory locking functions,
such as the <code class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">mlock</span></code> call on many Unix systems.</p>
<p>Two of the allocation method used (“malloc” and “mmap”) don’t
require any extra privileges on Unix, but locking memory does. At
startup, each allocator type will attempt to allocate a few blocks
(typically totaling 128k), so if you want, you can run your
application <code class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">setuid</span></code> <code class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">root</span></code>, and then drop privileges
immediately after creating your <code class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">LibraryInitializer</span></code>. If you end
up using more than what’s been allocated, some of your sensitive data
might end up being swappable, but that beats running as <code class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">root</span></code>
all the time.</p>
<p>These classes should also be used within your own code for storing
sensitive data. They are only meant for primitive data types (int,
long, etc): if you want a container of higher level Botan objects, you
can just use a <code class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">std::vector</span></code>, since these objects know how to clear
themselves when they are destroyed. You cannot, however, have a
<code class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">std::vector</span></code> (or any other container) of <code class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">Pipe</span></code> objects or
filters, because these types have pointers to other filters, and
implementing copy constructors for these types would be both hard and
quite expensive (vectors of pointers to such objects is fine, though).</p>
<p>These types are not described in any great detail: for more information,
consult the definitive sources~–~the header files <code class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">secmem.h</span></code> and
<code class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">allocate.h</span></code>.</p>
<p><code class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">SecureBuffer</span></code> is a simple array type, whose size is specified at
compile time. It will automatically convert to a pointer of the
appropriate type, and has a number of useful functions, including
<code class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">clear()</span></code>, and <code class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">size_t</span></code> <code class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">size()</span></code>, which returns the length of
the array. It is a template that takes as parameters a type, and a
constant integer which is how long the array is (for example:
<code class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">SecureBuffer<byte,</span> <span class="pre">8></span> <span class="pre">key;</span></code>).</p>
<p><code class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">SecureVector</span></code> is a variable length array. Its size can be increased
or decreased as need be, and it has a wide variety of functions useful
for copying data into its buffer. Like <code class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">SecureBuffer</span></code>, it implements
<code class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">clear</span></code> and <code class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">size</span></code>.</p>
<div class="section" id="allocators">
<h2>Allocators<a class="headerlink" href="#allocators" title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h2>
<p>The containers described above get their memory from allocators. As a
user of the library, you can add new allocator methods at run time for
containers, including the ones used internally by the library, to
use. The interface to this is in <code class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">allocate.h</span></code>. Code needing to
allocate or deallocate memory calls <code class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">get_allocator</span></code>, which returns a
pointer to an allocator object. This pointer should not be freed: the
caller does not own the allocator (it is shared among multiple
allocatore users, and uses a mutex to serialize access internally if
necessary). It is possible to call <code class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">get_allocator</span></code> with a specific
name to request a particular type of allocator, otherwise, a default
allocator type is returned.</p>
<p>At start time, the only allocator known is a <code class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">Default_Allocator</span></code>,
which just allocates memory using <code class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">malloc</span></code>, and zeroizes it when the
memory is released. It is known by the name “malloc”. If you ask for
another type of allocator (“locking” and “mmap” are currently used),
and it is not available, some other allocator will be returned.</p>
<p>You can add in a new allocator type using <code class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">add_allocator_type</span></code>. This
function takes a string and a pointer to an allocator. The string gives this
allocator type a name to which it can be referred when one is requesting it
with <code class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">get_allocator</span></code>. If an error occurs (such as the name being
already registered), this function returns false. It will return true if the
allocator was successfully registered. If you ask it to,
<code class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">LibraryInitializer</span></code> will do this for you.</p>
<p>Finally, you can set the default allocator type that will be returned
using the policy setting “default_alloc” to the name of any previously
registered allocator.</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="sidebar">
<h3>Table Of Contents</h3>
<ul class="current">
<li class="toctree-l1"><a class="reference internal" href="index.html">Welcome</a></li>
<li class="toctree-l1"><a class="reference internal" href="reading.html">Recommended Reading</a></li>
<li class="toctree-l1"><a class="reference internal" href="building.html">Building The Library</a></li>
<li class="toctree-l1"><a class="reference internal" href="firststep.html">Getting Started</a></li>
<li class="toctree-l1"><a class="reference internal" href="filters.html">Information Flow: Pipes and Filters</a></li>
<li class="toctree-l1"><a class="reference internal" href="pubkey.html">Public Key Cryptography</a></li>
<li class="toctree-l1"><a class="reference internal" href="x509.html">Certificate Handling</a></li>
<li class="toctree-l1"><a class="reference internal" href="ssl.html">SSL and TLS</a></li>
<li class="toctree-l1"><a class="reference internal" href="bigint.html">BigInt</a></li>
<li class="toctree-l1"><a class="reference internal" href="lowlevel.html">The Low-Level Interface</a></li>
<li class="toctree-l1 current"><a class="current reference internal" href="#">Secure Memory Containers</a><ul>
<li class="toctree-l2"><a class="reference internal" href="#allocators">Allocators</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li class="toctree-l1"><a class="reference internal" href="kdf.html">Key Derivation Functions</a></li>
<li class="toctree-l1"><a class="reference internal" href="pbkdf.html">PBKDF Algorithms</a></li>
<li class="toctree-l1"><a class="reference internal" href="passhash.html">Password Hashing</a></li>
<li class="toctree-l1"><a class="reference internal" href="rng.html">Random Number Generators</a></li>
<li class="toctree-l1"><a class="reference internal" href="fpe.html">Format Preserving Encryption</a></li>
<li class="toctree-l1"><a class="reference internal" href="python.html">Python Binding</a></li>
</ul>
<div role="search">
<h3 style="margin-top: 1.5em;">Search</h3>
<form class="search" action="search.html" method="get">
<input type="text" name="q" />
<input type="submit" value="Go" />
<input type="hidden" name="check_keywords" value="yes" />
<input type="hidden" name="area" value="default" />
</form>
</div>
</div>
<div class="clearer"></div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="footer-wrapper">
<div class="footer">
<div class="left">
<div role="navigation" aria-label="related navigaton">
<a href="lowlevel.html" title="The Low-Level Interface"
accesskey="P">previous</a> |
<a href="kdf.html" title="Key Derivation Functions"
accesskey="N">next</a> |
<a href="genindex.html" title="General Index"
accesskey="I">index</a>
</div>
<div role="note" aria-label="source link">
<br/>
<a href="_sources/secmem.txt"
rel="nofollow">Show Source</a>
</div>
</div>
<div class="right">
<div class="footer" role="contentinfo">
© Copyright 2000-2011, Jack Lloyd.
Created using <a href="http://sphinx-doc.org/">Sphinx</a> 1.4.9.
</div>
</div>
<div class="clearer"></div>
</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>
