rafael-santiago/boojum

A masker and wiper for RAM data

What does Boojum is?

Good question but here "Boojum" is my implementation of an ideia for data oblivion discussed by Ferguson, Schneier and Kohno in their book "Cryptography Engineering".

There they called "Boojum" their proposal for sensitive data retention issues mitigation. By referring to Lewis Carroll's character. In short, you know that maybe something is there but you cannot see it (sorry for the spoiler, kids!)

In the book, the base of the presented discussion is given by the paper from 2002 "How to Forget a Secret" by Crescenzo, Ferguson, Impagliazzo and Jakobsson.

It also mitigates cold boot attacks, by the way, if you are worried about this kind of data leaking, cold boot attacks would be the most harmful problem that sensitive data retention in RAM can bring up you. If you are still skeptic about you can get some tips of this kind of issue in the paper "Lest We Remember: Cold Boot Attacks on Encryption Keys" from 2008 by Halderman, Schoen, Heninger, Clarkson, Paul, Calandrino, Feldman, Appelbaum and Felen.

Here as a C library, Boojum can be used when you need to retain sensitive data in memory. Yes, even for short periods of time, if it is sensitive and you are seeking to deliver best security practices from your stuff, you should care about attacks during this short retation time, too.

In general, I have been implemented it as it was originally described, having only few differences that you can know more about by reading the tech docs.

Supported platforms

I have been using it on FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Windows and also Linux.

How can I clone this repo?

The easiest way is:

BichoPapaum@R00f# git clone https://github.com/rafael-santiago/boojum --recursive
BichoPapaum@R00f# cd boojum/src
BichoPapaum@Roof:~/boojum/src# _

Congrats! Now you should read:

• doc/BUILD.md
• doc/MANUAL.md

Enjoy! Rafael, May 2022.