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

[johnl at iecc.com (John Levine)]

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.

Pre-VM OS/360 may not have.

R's,
John