gobooj

GoBooj

Bruce Schneier's Boojum in Go

Boojum is a concept presented in Schneier's Cryptography Engineering book, which is intended to somewhat mitigate the threat posed by cold-boot attacks. Since DRAM cells tend to degrade with similar rates on similar addressing rows, Boojum tries to spray key material over different sections of the address space and then bring them back together.

I had a need for something like this in my Wraith password manager project, but was unable to find any implementations. So, like a dumbass, I rolled my own.

Usage

GoBooj spins up a goroutine that runs in the background to handle constant rotation of memory cells. You must provide an error handling function, since this background task may fail asynchronously during rotation.

// Create Instance
booj := gobooj.Init(func(err error) {
    fmt.Printf( "Oh noes! The FBI is after muh LUNIX! error %s\n",err.Error())
})

// Set Key Material
booj.Set([]byte("hunter2"))

// Get Key Material
keyBytes, _ := booj.Get()

doSomething(keyBytes)

// Ok, done. Cleanup this mess, overwrite all key material
booj.Cleanup()

Caveats

I am not a professional cryptographer. This is just a pet project. There are very likely all kinds of things wrong with this implementation. You should assume that if you use this to store sensitive key material, you will get owned immediately.