Sensitive Data on the Heap

[TGrosser2]

The standard of Dynamic Memory Management does not clean up memory after having released it. So e.g. private keys might persist in RAM after an application using NTL was closed and a later instantiated process could access such signature.

The optional GMP library as well as STL allow overwriting standard allocators with a controlled heap management, but I don't see this realized in NTL; so I would not suggest to deploy NTL for highly sensitive data on a common operating systems.

[victorshoup]

That's a good observation. I suppose high security applications should wrap secret keys in an object with a destructor that will zero out the key