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c++securitymemoryram-scraping

Secure Memory Allocator in C++

I want to create an allocator which provides memory with the following attributes:

  • cannot be paged to disk.
  • is incredibly hard to access through an attached debugger

The idea is that this will contain sensitive information (like licence information) which should be inaccessible to the user. I have done the usual research online and asked a few other people about this, but I cannot find a good place start on this problem.

Solution

  • You can't really protect against memory access. You can probably prevent paging if you are running as an admin or as the system, but you cannot prevent the admin or system from reading your memory. Even if you could somehow completely block other processes from reading your memory (which you can't), another process could still actually inject a new thread into your process and read the memory that way.

    Even if you could somehow completely lock down your process and guarantee that the OS would never allow anyone else to access your process, you still don't have full protection. The entire OS could be running in a virtual machine, which could be paused and inspected at any time.

    You cannot protect memory contents from the owner of the system. Hollywood and the music industry have been aching for this for years. If it were possible, they'd already be doing it.