Study: comparing free and proprietary network stacks

Study: comparing free and proprietary network stacks

Could it just be some variables belonging to a .bss section (thereby being automagically zeroed)?

Unlikely. For someone sophisticated enough to do a code audit of six network stacks and count bugs, that would be a pretty glaring misunderstanding of C. It's not like zeroing the bss is either undocumented or nonstandard.