Re: Doubt in Security basics

Babu,

Strings in Java are immutable, meaning you cant change them.  You can
only modify copies of the original.  Because of this, if a password
was read into a String, you couldn't write over it to erase its
contents from memory.  It would be at the mercy of the garbage
collector.

With a char [], you can overwrite the elements of the array and be
reasonably safe that the password is gone from memory.

Kevin


On Tue, 15 Feb 2005 07:28:08 -0800 (PST), Babu Kopparam
<[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> 
> Hi! List,
> 
> Probably i feel this doubt is related with basic knowledge.
> 
> Whenever capturing the password, char[] is used instead of String object. What purpose does this solve.
>   ---  I am referring to JAVA.
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> -Babu.
>