Lib.rs

Keyring-rs

A cross-platform library to manage storage and retrieval of passwords (and other secrets) in the underlying platform secure store, with a fully-developed example that provides a command-line interface.

Usage

To use this crate in your project, include it in your Cargo.toml and don't disable the default features:

keyring = "4"

This will give you access to the keyring crate in your code. Now you can use the Entry::new function to create a new keyring entry. The new function takes a service name and a user's name which together identify the entry.

Passwords (strings) or secrets (binary data) can be added to an entry using its set_password or set_secret methods, respectively. (These methods create or update an entry in the underlying platform's persistent credential store.) The password or secret can then be read back using the get_password or get_secret methods. The underlying credential (with its password/secret data) can then be removed using the delete_credential method.

use keyring::{Entry, Result};

fn main() -> Result<()> {
    let entry = Entry::new("my-service", "my-name")?;
    entry.set_password("topS3cr3tP4$$w0rd")?;
    let password = entry.get_password()?;
    println!("My password is '{}'", password);
    entry.delete_credential()?;
    Ok(())
}

Errors

Creating and operating on entries can yield a keyring::Error which provides both a platform-independent code that classifies the error and, where relevant, underlying platform errors or more information about what went wrong.

Examples

The keychain-rs project contains a sample application (keyring-cli) and a sample library (ios).

The keyring-cli application is a command-line interface to the full functionality of the keyring. Invoke it without arguments to see usage information. It handles binary data input and output using base64 encoding. It can be installed using cargo install and used to experiment with library functionality. It can also be used when debugging keyring-based applications to probe the contents of the credential store.

The ios library is a full exercise of all the iOS functionality; it's meant to be loaded into an iOS test harness such as the one found in this project.

Client Testing

This crate comes with a mock credential store that can be used by clients who want to test without accessing the native platform store. The mock store is cross-platform and allows mocking errors as well as successes. See the developer docs for details.

Extensibility

This crate allows clients to bring their own credential store by providing traits that clients can implement. See the developer docs for details.

Platforms

This crate provides built-in implementations of the following platform-specific credential stores:

• Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD: The DBus-based Secret Service.
• macOS, iOS: Keychain Services.
• Windows: The Windows Credential Manager.

It can be built and used on other platforms, but will not provide a built-in credential store implementation; you will have to bring your own.

Platform-specific issues

Since neither the maintainers nor GitHub do testing on BSD variants, we rely on contributors to support these platforms. Thanks for your help!

If you use the Secret Service as your credential store, be aware of the following:

• The default build of this crate expects that libdbus will be installed on users' machines. If you have users whose machines might not have libdbus installed, you can specify the vendored feature when building this crate to statically link the dbus library with your app.
• Every call to the Secret Service is done via an inter-process call, which takes time (typically tens if not hundreds of milliseconds).
• By default, this implementation does not encrypt secrets when sending them to or fetching them from the Dbus. If you want them encrypted, you can specify the encrypted feature when building this crate.

If you use the Windows-native credential store, be careful about multi-threaded access, because the Windows credential store does not guarantee your calls will be serialized in the order they are made. Always access any single credential from just one thread at a time, and if you are doing operations on multiple credentials that require a particular serialization order, perform all those operations from the same thread.

The macOS and iOS credential stores do not allow service names or usernames to be empty, because empty fields are treated as wildcards on lookup. Use some default, non-empty value instead.

Upgrading from v3

There are no functional API changes between v4 and v3. All the changes are in the keystore implementations and how features are used to select keystores:

• Version 4 of this crate removes a number of the built-in credential stores that were available in version 3, namely the async secret service and linux keyutils. These keystores are being contributed directly to the existing secret-service and linux-keyutils crates, respectively.
• Version 4 of this crate dispenses with the need to explicitly specify which credential store you want to use on each platform. Instead, the default feature set provides a single credential store on each platform. If you would rather bring your own store, and not build this crate's built-in ones, you can simply suppress the default feature set.
• The built-in macOS keystore now supports use of the Data Protection keychain, which is the same keychain used by iOS. You can specify a target of "Data Protection" (or simply "Protected") to write and read credentials in that keychain.

All v2/v3 data is fully forward-compatible with v4 data; there have been no changes at all in that respect.

The Rust edition of this crate has moved to 2024, and the MSRV has moved to 1.85.

License

Licensed under either of

• Apache License, Version 2.0, (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

at your option.

Contributors

Thanks to the following for helping make this library better, whether through contributing code, discussion, or bug reports!

• @Alexei-Barnes
• @benwr
• @bhkaminski
• @Brooooooklyn
• @brotskydotcom
• @complexspaces
• @connor4312
• @dario23
• @dten
• @gondolyr
• @hwchen
• @jankatins
• @jasikpark
• @jkhsjdhjs
• @jonathanmorley
• @jyuch
• @klemensn
• @landhb
• @lexxvir
• @noib3
• @MaikKlein
• @Phrohdoh
• @phlip9
• @ReactorScram
• @Rukenshia
• @russellbanks
• @ryanavella
• @samuela
• @ShaunSHamilton
• @soywod
• @stankec
• @steveatinfincia
• @Sytten
• @thewh1teagle
• @tmpfs
• @unkcpz
• @VorpalBlade
• @zschreur

If you should be on this list, but don't find yourself, please contact @brotskydotcom.

Contribution

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.