[171011] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: [[Infowarrior] - NSA Said to Have Used Heartbleed Bug for Years]
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John Levine)
Mon Apr 14 20:51:03 2014
Date: 15 Apr 2014 00:50:07 -0000
From: "John Levine" <johnl@iecc.com>
To: nanog@nanog.org
In-Reply-To: <534C68F4.305@cox.net>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
In article <534C68F4.305@cox.net> you write:
>On 4/14/2014 9:38 AM, Matthew Black wrote:
>> Shouldn't a decent OS scrub RAM and disk sectors before allocating
>> them to processes, unless that process enters processor privileged
>> mode and sets a call flag? I recall digging through disk sectors on
>> RSTS/E to look for passwords and other interesting stuff over 30
>> years ago.
>
>I have been out of the loop for quite a while but my strongly held
>belief is that such scrubbing would be an enormous (and intolerable)
>overhead ...
It must be quite a while. Unix systems have routinely cleared the RAM
and disk allocated to programs since the earliest days.
Pre-VM OS/360 may not have.
R's,
John
