full-disclosure - Xfree86 video buffering?

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Message-ID: <39053.198.162.158.16.1109284527.squirrel@198.162.158.16>
From: eric at arcticbears.com (Eric Paynter)
Subject: Xfree86 video buffering?

On Wed, February 23, 2005 1:08 pm, KF (lists) said:
> Recently I have noticed that after shutting down my machine or rebooting
> my X-windows will briefly flash an image of whatever I was doing when I
> rebooted the machine or logged out.
>
> As an example if I was browsing porn at night in mozilla just before I
> clicked "K->Logout...->Reboot Computer" in KDE, the next morning when my
> Girlfriend turns my computer on she gets a quick 2 second shot of my
> porn  just before the KDM login screen.
>
> What causes this? Can it be prevented? I can certainly see sensitive
> data potentially being leaked via this quirk.

All kidding aside, this seems to be a real security issue. Your system
shouldn't be showing unauthorized users what you were doing. It should
properly flush the memory.

Does a power off flush it?

-Eric

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