[171015] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: [[Infowarrior] - NSA Said to Have Used Heartbleed Bug for Years]
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Doug Barton)
Mon Apr 14 22:48:23 2014
Date: Mon, 14 Apr 2014 19:47:46 -0700
From: Doug Barton <dougb@dougbarton.us>
To: nanog@nanog.org
In-Reply-To: <20140415005007.32870.qmail@joyce.lan>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
On 04/14/2014 05:50 PM, John Levine wrote:
> 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.
When you say "clear the disk allocated to programs" what do you mean
exactly?
