microsoft / microsoft/rust-symcrypt
Add zeroize for output key material
Nobody has claimed this yet.
- Dominant language
- Rust
- Stars
- 72
- Forks
- 15
- Avg merge
- 3d 2h
- Merged PRs (30d)
- 11
Description
Several APIs return or hold sensitive key material (recovered plaintext from AES-KW(P) ,private key bytes from ECDH/ECDSA/RSA exports, derived secrets from HKDF/SP800-108, etc.) in plain Vec or [u8; N]. Dropping these values does not wipe the underlying memory, so secrets can linger in the allocator until the pages are reused.
At a minimum, should document to users that they should zero themselves, or implement zeroize.
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Start by inventorying the APIs that return or hold recovered AES-KW(P) plaintext, ECDH/ECDSA/RSA export bytes, and HKDF/SP800-108 derived secrets. Read their return types and ownership behavior, then determine whether the agreed completion is user documentation or zeroization coverage for all affected outputs.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- rust
- Domain
- cryptography, security
- Issue type
- Feature
- Difficulty
- 4/5
- Estimated time
- 3-5 days
- Activity status
- Quiet
- Clarity
- Needs clarification
- Newbie friendliness
- 35/100