MRAM, persistance of memory

[Major Variola (ret.)]

The persistance of memory could be a problem if your melting
clocks are swarmed by spooky ants.

Wired has an article on magetic RAM
http://wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,59559,00.html
that fails to mention security implications.  Obviously
nonvolitile RAM presents a different security risk than
RAM that forgets when powered off.  Will future OSes
have provisions to keep certain data out of MRAM banks,
if MRAM doesn't completely displace DRAM?
I doubt it.

And shutting off your virtual memory swapping
--useful today because of the gobs of DRAM machines have--
will no longer be useful for security.

Not so obviously to the layman is how many times MRAM
must be overwritten to keep the TLAs away.  (Exactly
analogous to scrubbing a disk.)  While this is trivial to do for
user-space,
if the OS keeps copies of sensitive info this might require
more than a huge malloc() & overwrites before shutdown.