Data in RAM isn't as secure as it seems. Even if you never store a piece of data on disk it can end up on disk as part of your swapfile for months and years if the page in memory its in happens to be swapped out. Perl variables (I believe) also do not guarantee erasure. Even simply reassigning the value of a variable or undefing it does not guarantee that its previous value is gone from memory. This problem just gets worse when you're dealing with more complicated perl constructs (hashes and arrays)

$a=qw{foo};
$a=qw{bar};
[download]

"foo" may still exist in memory somewhere L