Shrouded, secure memory management in Rust
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Hi HN!I've been building a project that handles high-value credentials in-process, and I wanted something more robust than just zeroing memory on drop. A comment on a recent Show HN[0] made me realize that awareness of lower-level memory protection techniques might not be as widespread as I thought.The idea here is to pull out all the tools in one crate, with a relatively simple API. * mlock/VirtualLock to prevent sensitive memory from being swapped (eg the KeePass dump) * Core dump exclusion using MADV_DONTDUMP on Linux & Android * mprotect to minimize exposure over time * Guard pages to mitigate under/overflowsAfter some battle testing, the goal here is to provide a more secure memory foundation for things like password managers and cryptocurrency wallets.This was a fun project, and I learned a lot - would love any feedback![0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47073430
HN · launched Mar 23, 2026 · 5 upvotes (top 89%) · 0 views
Niche: encryption and cryptography tools · 147 launches, 21 in the last 7 days ▲ +40% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Dev tools
- Developer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 147 launches in encryption and cryptography tools →
Could you build this?
No This is a low-level systems security library in Rust interacting directly with OS-level memory management primitives (e.g., mprotect, guard pages, mlock) to protect secrets against memory dumps.
What it would actually take: Implementing this requires deep knowledge of OS virtual memory internals across Linux, macOS, and Windows (using syscalls like mprotect, VirtualProtect, madvise, and mlock). The hard part is ensuring constant-time access, defeating compiler optimizations that reorder or eliminate zeroing, and managing cross-platform guard pages safely in Rust without triggering undefined behavior. It requires specialized systems programming and memory exploit mitigation expertise.
Discussion
No comments on this launch.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 871 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #798 of 872 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 144 days after the earliest competitor.
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- KeyEnv · hn · 2026-01-18 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.52
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