Irretrievably destroying data in Java

Question

Is there anyway in Java to delete data (e.g., a variable value, object) and be sure it can\'t be recovered from memory? Does assigning null to a variable in Jav

Answer 1

If you're thinking about securing password/key management, you could write some JNI code that uses platform-specific API to store the keys in a secure way and not leak the data into the memory managed by the JVM. For example, you could store the keys in a page locked in physical memory and could prevent the IO bus from accessing the memory.

EDIT: To comment on some of the previous answers, the JVM could relocate your objects in memory without erasing their previous locations, so, even char[], bytes, ints and other "erasable" data types aren't an answer if you really want to make sure that no sensitive information is stored in the memory managed by the JVM or swapped on to the hard drive.