Shrouded, secure memory management in Rust
Details
- External ID
- 47493845
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Shrouded, secure memory management in Rust
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- March 23, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 5
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.1070110701107011
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
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
Enrichment
- Theme
- self-hosted infrastructure and security tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- secure memory management library for rust
- Manually corrected
- False
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 — 375 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #339 of 376 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 144 days after the earliest competitor.
- A password system with no database, no sync, and nothing to breach · hn · 2026-02-06 · 14 upvotes · similarity 0.57
- Clone, a small Rust VMM, forks VMs in under 20ms via CoW · hn · 2026-04-19 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.55
- Sklad · hn · 2026-02-02 · 22 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- CambiOS · hn · 2026-06-11 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- Minikv · hn · 2026-02-03 · 71 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- Numax · hn · 2026-06-16 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- KeyEnv · hn · 2026-01-18 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- Lockstep · hn · 2026-03-16 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.50
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a dev tools tool for Sales yet.