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

Tue Apr 15 13:59:49 UTC 2014

On 04/15/2014 09:56 AM, Matthew Black wrote:
> From: Doug Barton [mailto:dougb at dougbarton.us] 
>> When you say "clear the disk allocated to programs" what do you mean
>> exactly?
> 
> Seriously? When files are deleted, their sectors are simply released to the free space pool without erasing their contents. Allocation of disk sectors without clearing them gives users/programs access to file contents previously stored by other users/programs.
> 
> As to why this is a problem, well, as they write in some math textbooks, the answer is trivial and left as an exercise to the reader. Well, usually trivial.
> 
> matthew black
> california state university, long beach
> 
> 

Bruce Schneier gave a plug for bleachbit - it does a reasonable job of
trying to clean things up for you.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Doug Barton [mailto:dougb at dougbarton.us] 
> Sent: Monday, April 14, 2014 7:48 PM
> To: nanog at nanog.org
> Subject: Re: [[Infowarrior] - NSA Said to Have Used Heartbleed Bug for Years]
> 
> On 04/14/2014 05:50 PM, John Levine wrote:
>> In article <534C68F4.305 at 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?
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 

-- 
Glen Wiley
KK4SFV