Re: Zeroed pages returned for heap

[Peter Staubach]

Nagendra Singh Tomar wrote:

> Hi all,
> 	The short version first.
> Is it OK for an application (a C library implementing malloc/calloc is 
> also an application) to assume that the pages returned by the OS for heap 
> allocation (either directly thru brk() or thru mmap(MAP_ANONYMOUS)) will 
> be zero filled. 

An application which makes assumptions about the contents of newly allocated
memory would seem to be making very dangerous assumptions.

Ignoring that, would it not be considered to be a security violation to hand
pieces of memory to applications without erasing the old contents of the 
pages?

   Thanx...

      ps
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