3 ms·

So if it’s hard to enforce, what’s the reason we go through the effort of zeroing anyway? Isn’t this one of those things that either need to be 100% reliable to

So if it’s hard to enforce, what’s the reason we go through the effort of zeroing anyway? Isn’t this one of those things that either need to be 100% reliable to be useful? Or is this more about preventing escalation in case someone finds an exploit in your code?

wolletd 4y ago
Zeroing is just a form of initialization. If you initialize the memory right away (and completely!) with actual data, there's no need for additional zeroing. Zeroing is something one should do if the allocated memory isn't completely initialized right away. In my experience, that's not only about someone finding exploits, but also about stability. When people write code, most of the time they simply work with the assumption that an `int` contains a 0 by default and that code usually fails in unpredictable ways if it does not. Accessing uninitalized memory is just always an error and having uninitalized memory laying around in your application has rarely any benefit. Either assign a value or zero it. Not doing either of those suggests the allocation isn't needed right there in the first place.