Re:Cloudflare Reverse Proxies Are Dumping Uninitialized Memory
by kjksf on Thursday February 23, 2017 @09:42PM
(#13720439)
You asked for a reason, not for a good reason.
malloc/free were designed around 1972. That was a time where performance was much more important and security concerns didn't really exists.
Modern systems, like Go, do zero-out newly allocated memory because they do consider a bit more security to be more important than a bit more performance.
But changing the defaults of malloc/free is not really an option and it would probably break stuff.
Especially on Linux, where, I believe, malloc returns uncommitted pages, which increases the perf advantage in some cases.
Security conscious programmers can use calloc() or write their own wrappers over malloc/free.
malloc/free were designed around 1972. That was a time where performance was much more important and security concerns didn't really exists.
Modern systems, like Go, do zero-out newly allocated memory because they do consider a bit more security to be more important than a bit more performance.
But changing the defaults of malloc/free is not really an option and it would probably break stuff.
Especially on Linux, where, I believe, malloc returns uncommitted pages, which increases the perf advantage in some cases.
Security conscious programmers can use calloc() or write their own wrappers over malloc/free.