4 ms·

I thought of a scenario like, your process deallocates a page of memory, so it gets marked as unused by the OS, then some other application requests memory and

by _0ffh 4y ago

I thought of a scenario like, your process deallocates a page of memory, so it gets marked as unused by the OS, then some other application requests memory and gets handed your old page, with all the data you left in there. Would that not be leaking information?

kragen 4y ago
on linux the os zeroes the page to prevent this
butlerm 4y ago
Operating systems with support for memory protection and virtual memory generally don't behave that way for security reasons. Everything that is allocated to a process will be zeroed explicitly or on first reference. There are older operating systems that don't do that though. On the Amiga you have to explicitly ask the OS for memory to be cleared, and if you don't you may get uncleared memory left over from some other process.