“Surfing porn in Google Chrome’s Incognito mode lets you check out all the sex you want without anyone being the wiser, unless you’re on a Mac,” Jeff Gamet writes for The Mac Observer. “Evan Andersen found a bug in Chrome that left his fun time activity loaded in his NVIDIA graphics card memory — a bug that NVIDIA claims is actually Apple’s fault.”
“Incognito mode is a feature that doesn’t log your browser history or keep cached images, both of which are especially handy if you don’t want anyone knowing what you’re looking at online,” Gamet writes. “In Mr. Andersen’s case, however, the images he was checking out a few hours earlier popped up on his display when he started to play Diablo III. Instead of seeing the usual splash screen as the game loaded, he saw a jumble of porn shots he checked out prior launching the game.”
Gamet writes, “‘So how did this happen? A bug in Nvidia’s GPU drivers,’ Mr. Andersen said.”
Read more in the full article here.
GPU memory is not erased before giving it to an application. This allows the contents of one application to leak into another. When the Chrome incognito window was closed, its framebuffer was added to the pool of free GPU memory, but it was not erased. When Diablo requested a framebuffer of its own, Nvidia offered up the one previously used by Chrome. Since it wasn’t erased, it still contained the previous contents. Since Diablo doesn’t clear the buffer itself (as it should), the old incognito window was put on the screen again. — Evan Andersen
“But this isn’t Nvidia’s fault. At least, according to Nvidia,” Emil Protalinski reports for VentureBeat. “‘This issue is related to memory management in the Apple OS, not NVIDIA graphics drivers,’ a Nvidia spokesperson told VentureBeat. ‘The NVIDIA driver adheres to policies set by the operating system and our driver is working as expected. We have not seen this issue on Windows, where all application-specific data is cleared before memory is released to other applications.'”
“Anderson wrote a program to reliably reproduce the bug by scanning the GPU’s memory for non-zero pixels. The tool was able to reproduce a Reddit page closed on another user account, down to each and every pixel,” Protalinski reports. “Some Reddit users are reporting this issue also occurs with AMD graphics cards, adding to the validity that this is an OS X issue not an Nvidia one.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Forget porn for a moment. If it can reproduce a Reddit page, it can reproduce anything, right? Like bank websites and such?
Of course, physical access is necessary; this doesn’t work any other way, but this bug should still be fixed.