Life after free?

[Kevin D. Quitt]

In article <5360:Oct421:09:4890 at kramden.acf.nyu.edu> brnstnd at kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein) writes:
>In article <623 at demott.COM> kdq at demott.COM (Kevin D. Quitt) writes:
>>     It should be noted that in secure systems, free() will clear the memory.
>
>That would be quite amusing, since there's absolutely no concept of
>security within C. If you can free it, you can copy it out and save it
>first.
>

    That's no problem.  It's what the next guy does when he gets the
memory you've freed up.  I used to do this all the time (freeing and
allocating memory) so I could examine it for all sorts of useful
information.  This may happen more than you're aware of in a paged-
memory system.  In a previous life, it was my job to break into systems
and this was one of my favorite tools.  It's amazing what people leave
in their trash!


-- 
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Kevin D. Quitt         demott!kdq   kdq at demott.com
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