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

Mon Apr 14 23:02:12 UTC 2014

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 in any but a classified system running up around "secret" or 
higher. (I know of a system in Silicon Valley where they would bring us 
core dumps to print because their system was down so hard.

The dump program would take about a third of a box of fanfold and stack 
it, still blank, as I recall, in the stacker.

Seems like the law of the land was "If you did not set the value, you 
can make no assumptions about it."

-- 
Requiescas in pace o email           Two identifying characteristics
                                         of System Administrators:
Ex turpi causa non oritur actio      Infallibility, and the ability to
                                         learn from their mistakes.
                                           (Adapted from Stephen Pinker)