Dennis McHenry wrote: > > From: "Felix von Leitner" <leitnerat_private> > > This wasn't perchance a Microsoft operating system you were using? > It's been a while since I've done C for a win system, but as I recall Malloc > returns zeroed-out chunks. > > My response to Jason's point, though, is that if a program doesn't handle > sensitive information in a prudent manner (preventing it from being swapped > to disk, overwriting the memory space where it was stored, etc.), the > information could indeed be in memory. I'd label this as a programming > error for the application that left it's sensitive info. sitting around, > rather than an OS problem (I don't recall Windows saying it wiped memory > after closing applications). > > If you're using a win box, you can use debug to examine memory remnants. > If you are using the debug version of the C-runtime libs for Windows, freed memory is set to a characteristic value so that you can recognize if you are ever de-referencing a pointer into freed memory (0x45 is think). You can use the debugger to watch Release built applications memory in a realistic way though. -- Jason Seats Information Security Software Engineer TechGuard Security jason.seatsat_private www.techguardsecurity.com 636-519-4848
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Wed Jun 27 2001 - 10:47:15 PDT