Zap a memset that was redundant since OpenSSL 0.97b was merged by markus in 2003. Nowadays it's otto's recallocarray(3) that does the zeroing. ok beck inoguchi otto PS: ASN1_BIT_STRING_set_bit(3) was committed on Dec 21 1998 by Ralf S. Engelschnall and used this bizarre allocation idiom: if (a->data == NULL) c=(unsigned char *)Malloc(w+1); else c=(unsigned char *)Realloc(a->data,w+1); People complained about Malloc, Realloc and Free being used elsewhere, so on Jun 1 2000, Richarde Levitte swept the OpenSSL tree and it became this. if (a->data == NULL) c=(unsigned char *)OPENSSL_malloc(w+1); else c=(unsigned char *)OPENSSL_realloc(a->data,w+1); Then it was found that existing data should be cleaned, and on Nov 13 2002 Ben Laurie changed the last line to c=(unsigned char *)OPENSSL_realloc_clean(a->data, a->length, w+1);