Some info on file/memory erasing on NT

[Andy Brown]

The subject of protecting memory and files from other users in a multi-user
environment always seems to come up here every few weeks, so the following
short article culled from the MS Win32 SDK might be of interest.


- Andy

[...]
SUMMARY

File systems under Windows NT currently have virtual secure erasure (when a
file is deleted, the data is no longer accessible through the operating
system). Although the bits could still be on disk, Windows NT will not
allow access to them.

MORE INFORMATION

The NTFS file system does this by keeping a high-water mark, for each file,
of bytes written to the file. Everything below the line is real data,
anything above the line is (on disk) random garbage that used to be free
space, but any attempt to read past this high-water mark returns all zeros.

Other reusable objects are also protected. For example, all the memory
pages in a process's address space are zeroed when they are touched (unlike
the file system, a process may directly access its pages, and thus the
pages must be actually zeroed rather than virtually zeroed).

Note that file system security assumes physical security; in other words,
if a person has physical access to a machine and can boot an alternative
operating system and/or add custom device drivers and programs, he/she can
always get direct access to the bits on disk.
[...]