Re: [[Infowarrior] - NSA Said to Have Used Heartbleed Bug for Years]

["John Levine" <johnl () iecc com>]

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