Nvidia Blames Apple For Bug That Exposes Browsing In Chrome's Incognito (venturebeat.com)

An anonymous reader points out this story at VentureBeat about a bug in Chrome's incognito mode that might be a cause for concern for some Apple users. From the story: "If you use Google Chrome's incognito mode to hide what you browse (ahem, porn), this might pique your interest. University of Toronto engineering student Evan Andersen discovered a bug that affects Nvidia graphics cards, exposing content that you thought would be for your eyes only. And because this only happens on Macs, Nvidia is pointing the finger at Apple."

Comments

Easy Fix for the Paranoid: Cold Reboot

[slacka]

I've done some GLSL programming and it's not unreasonable for clearing a GPU buffer to take 1/20 to 1/10 the time as the actual operation on that buffer. How many Nvidia users (read gamers) would prefer to take a 5% performance hit to prevent occasional glitches like this?

This has absolutely nothing to do with Nvidia's drivers. It is a glitch in Diablo III and maybe something Chrome could address for the paranoid out there. Meanwhile, if you're really that worried about someone seeing a glimpse of your porn hours earlier, just turn your computer off/on before allowing anyone to use it next. Problem solved.

Re:Easy Fix for the Paranoid: Cold Reboot

[afourney]

It's not a 5% hit. You only have to clear the buffer once on exit. And, Nvidia is right:This is something the OS should do (just like it closes filehandles, and frees other resources on exit). Why not leave it up to the app? Because, apps don't always exit cleanly.

Re: Easy Fix for the Paranoid: Cold Reboot

[Dog-Cow]

There isn't a single OS that doesn't do this. You wrote a bunch of crap that has nothing to do with what the GP wrote.

Blame Chrome

[pushing-robot]

Chrome advertises its Incognito mode as leaving no traces behind. Therefore, it should be responsible for wiping its framebuffer, just as it clears caches, cookies and history. It's like writing a file shredder that doesn't actually overwrite files, then blaming the OS and hard drive manufacturer for the oversight.

It might be nice if framebuffers and such were zeroed on release, but like overwriting files, it's a time/energy/security tradeoff. Besides, the screen isn't really protected anyway; IIRC applications on most OSes can capture the screen without even admin privileges. After apps are sandboxed into seeing only their own windows we can talk about securing the framebuffer.

incognito starts remembering history

[endangeredcritters]

There is a far simpler way to defeat chromes incognito mode, just use it for awhile. After some unknown (not forever) period of use, it will start to not forget history even after it's been shutdown and restarted. At least in 'Version 44.0.2403.107 (64-bit)' running in Linux Mint.

Re: It's your own fault Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

IOS saves screenshots of the applications for the task selector thingy and also for "fast" application switching where the screenshot is used for the zooming effect and as placeholder while the real application is still being (re)loaded. There is a separate screenshot for each orientation. It is possible that you launch or switch to the the browser or some other application and IOS will display a possibly very old screenshot of your private porn browsing session or some other private stuff that you had closed and purged from the logs ages ago. During the application switch effect the old screenshot is visible only momentarily but the same images can also be viewed from the task selector.

1. Device at orientation A: open browser, enter private mode and browse for some pron.
2. Switch to the home screen (screenshot it saved) and change to orientation B
3. Go back to browser and close all pron tabs
4. Switch to the home screen (screenshot is saved but this one is for orientation B)
5. Change back to orientation A and enter the task selector or go back to the application. The old private browsing screenshot should be visible.

Re: It's your own fault Apple

[TheRaven64]

The question is where the image is leaking from. It's either from the copy owned Chrome itself, or from the copy owned by the window server. Apple's window server keeps a copy of the frame buffer to allow the system to kill the underlying application (if it advertises support for sudden termination) and have it resurrect in the same state without the user being aware. This is part of the mechanism on Darwin for handling low-memory situations: an application that has no unsaved state is killed and is then restarted when the user attempts to interact with it. This copy of the window contents may last for longer than the attached application (I don't know what the policy is for garbage collecting them).

Re:Except it's not.

[AmiMoJo]

Unlikely, because Windows does enforce clearing of newly allocated memory, including on the GPU. The drivers would fail WHQL certification if they didn't. The probably didn't bother on Mac OS either because of an oversight or to get a little more performance.

It might be possible within specific apps if they mismanage GPU memory, but certainly not across apps as described in TFA. Well, unless there is some unknown bug, but Nvidia are saying there isn't and it is tested for WHQL certification.

Gonna need to see some more evidence than an anecdote I'm afraid. All available evidence says that Windows is unaffected.