KeyControl

KeyControl is a Ruby wrapper for the keyctl commands available on most Linux systems. It provides a Hash-like API for storing and retrieving data using the kernel's built-in key management facilities.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'key_control'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install key_control

Usage

Availability

You can check if KeyControl is supported on your system with KeyControl.available?. This will attempt to locate a libkeyutils shared library on the system, and return a boolean based on detection.

Key Storage/Retrieval

The basic API consists of a single class, KeyControl::KeyRing. The KeyRing initializer takes a single argument, the ID of the keyring you wish to store your data in. There are several (very useful) special keyrings, which are available for use as constants in the KeyControl module.

As an example, we'll create a basic accessor for the session keyring (useful for sharing information among several grouped processes):

keyring = KeyControl::KeyRing.new(KeyControl::SESSION)

Once you have your keyring instance, just add and fetch values like you would with any regular Hash:

keyring["mykey"] = "my passphrase"
keyring["mykey"]
# => "my passphrase"

That's it! The power of this gem is the ability to use your kernel's built-in key management mechanism to share information between Ruby processes, without exposing your data to the outside world.

Key Deletion/Expiration

There are two options to remove values from the current keyring. You can remove a piece of data immediately with KeyRing#delete:

keyring.delete("mykey")
keyring["mykey"]
# => nil

Alternately, if you need temporary access to the key, but want to ensure that it will be removed from the keyring at some point in the future, KeyRing#set_timeout is available:

keyring.set_timeout("mykey", 3)
keyring["mykey"]
# => "my passphrase"
sleep 4
keyring["mykey"]
# => nil

Contributing

1. Fork it ( http://github.com/ahorner/key_control/fork )
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request

Thanks

• @gabrielg: For refactoring the library detection, and setting up a slick vagrant test suite.
• @qfire: For contributing the handy unlink and set_timeout operations.