We actually had a command-line argument to the vm to optionally zero the gc
after collection but we removed the feature somewhere around when we
dropped BSD support. It's probably better than nothing but if they could
read your memory after a gc why not just read it before gc instead?
Doug
On Wed, Jan 17, 2018 at 1:34 PM Björn Lindqvist <bjou...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Factor when run in debug mode actually clears memory. See
> bump_allocator.hpp. Unfortunately clearing memory is slow as hell. The time
> complexity of copying gc is proportional to the number of surviving
> objects. But if you want to clear memory too it becomes proportional to the
> total number of allocated objects.
>
> Plus, relying on the gc to zero out sensitive memory is a bad idea. You
> never know when the gc runs or if it runs at all. That's why it is
> considered bad practice in Java to use finalizers. I think it would be
> better to use the destructors vocab to implement zeroing out of sensitive
> memory.
>
> 2018-01-16 23:17 GMT+01:00 Alexander Ilin <ajs...@yandex.ru>:
>
>> Hello!
>>
>> I was reading a manual on the `8th` language, and noticed an
>> interesting feature.
>> Apparently, it's possible to call a word on a memory buffer and thereby
>> mark it as "sensitive information".
>> GC would zero the memory upon release.
>>
>> Zeroing every bit of memory on release would add a lot of overhead (as
>> I understand), but selectively clearing it like this could help with
>> security applications that deal with certificates and passwords and stuff.
>> This is especially useful, because in Factor GC can relocate (= copy)
>> objects in memory. Does it clean up the memory it copied?
>>
>> Do we have such a feature? Is it difficult to implement?
>> Bjourne, you've seen a lot of the runtime, can you comment?
>>
>> ---=====---
>> Александр
>>
>>
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>
>
>
> --
> mvh/best regards Björn Lindqvist
>
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