The Char[] Cult
The article discusses the risks associated with storing sensitive information in Java Strings. It emphasizes that if a machine is compromised, the data can be accessed regardless of how it is stored. The author argues that using char[] for sensitive data does not provide significant protection against real-world attacks.
- ▪Storing sensitive information in a String can lead to security vulnerabilities due to the JVM's String pool.
- ▪Compromised machines can expose sensitive data regardless of storage methods.
- ▪Using char[] for sensitive data does not guarantee protection from attackers if other vulnerabilities exist.
Hacker News (Newest) files mainly under programming. We currently carry 5,306 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Feds-will-find |
| Canonical URL | https://feds-will-find.you/blog/the-char-cult |
| Publication time | Sat, 30 May 2026 17:24:56 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-30T17:29:42.897Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-30T17:29:42.897Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | None |
| Cluster logic | Not yet clustered, or no peer story found in the clustering window. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
I'm sure you've heard it before. "Never store sensitive information in a String because it can be stored on the heap indefinitely in the JVM's String pool and zeroing it out might not erase it." If someone is dumping the heap of a JVM, they're executing code locally on your machine. Whether they got access to JMX ports or added a Java instrumentation agent or LD_PRELOADed something in or have root on the machine doesn't matter. They compromised your machine, and you can only cover your ass at this point. Next, if your program is dealing with ANY requests from the Internet, congratulations, that potentially sensitive data is getting stored as, you guessed it, a String. Next, go open your computer settings and check how much of the memory is being swapped to the disk.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Feds-will-find.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from Feds-will-find
