If you're worried about what ends up in swap, you may want to check whether your OS offers functionality like the following:

In OpenBSD, the sysctl(8) command allows you to instruct the OS to encrypt the pages to go to swap. See the man pages for more information on that feature.
Resulting in the (shell) command of: 
$ sudo sysctl -w vm.swapencrypt.enable=1
vm.swapencrypt.enable: 0 -> 1

[download]
Granted, it relies on your OS' feature set and it's not done in Perl. Still, it may alleviate your concerns.

Cheers,

Rogier
--
If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there.

In reply to Encrypting swap (OS-dependent) by rkrieger
in thread Can I do secure memory management in Perl scripts for cryptographic applications? by radiantmatrix

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.