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

Tue Apr 15 02:47:46 UTC 2014

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?