A realm management unit (RMU) 20 manages ownership of memory regions by realms, each realm corresponding to at least a portion of a software process executed by processing circuitry. Memory access circuitry 26 enforces ownership rights for the regions, with the owner realm having a right to exclude other realms from accessing data stored within its owned region. The RMU 20 controls transitions of memory regions between region states, including an invalid state 220, a valid state 222, and a scrub-commit state 800 in which the memory region is allocated to an owner realm, inaccessible to that owner realm until a scrubbing process has been performed for the memory region to set each storage location of the region to a value uncorrelated with a previous value stored in the storage location, and prevented from being reallocated to a different owner realm.