3 ms·
Practical questions for ordinary users: as I understand it, a malicious actor could inject Javascript into a web site which could read all my computers memory.
by herodotus 9y ago
Practical questions for ordinary users: as I understand it, a malicious actor could inject Javascript into a web site which could read all my computers memory. To read, for example, my bank credentials, would they have to be sitting in memory at the time the malicious code was executed? Could I mitigate this risk by, for example, quitting my browser and relaunching it after visiting my bank? Or will my unencrypted password still potentially be lingering somewhere in memory? Could vendors provide a "memory cleaner" that I could use between web site visits?
- schoen 9y agoTypical allocator free() calls don't actually overwrite the memory, meaning that the data stays there until it happens to get overwritten by a future process, which is an unpredictable event. When I was doing research on the cold boot attacks I did a lot of "strings /dev/mem" and would notice stuff related to things I was working on several days ago. As our cold boot paper described, this could sometimes include things that you were doing even before the computer was last rebooted. There is a really nice paper on this particular topic https://benpfaff.org/papers/shredding.html/index.html https://benpfaff.org/papers/shredding.html/index.html which describes some useful countermeasures which haven't been widely implemented. If they had been, they could have somewhat reduced the impact of opportunistic exploitation of memory disclosure vulnerabilities.