Windows desktop GPU memory leaking into Linux screenshare app
github.com
github.com
I accidentally found that my Linux screenshare program is able to send leftover video memory from a previous Windows boot (shut down 5 days ago) over the Internet, showing the private Windows desktop contents of the last logged in user.
This doesn't seem good security-wise for all parts involved.
My only guess: Do you have Windows Quick Start turned on? Because that doesn’t shut down the computer all the way; it just puts it in a deep sleep (i.e. the graphics card and its RAM are still powered)
I'm not complaining about the lack of physical decay in DRAM, but about software.
I think the reason this hasn’t been addressed is because, from my understanding of the problem, people don’t reboot to a different OS running at a different resolution, so the problem was never noticed
Quite certainly a cold reboot will wipe GPU RAM, but that's beside the point that software should make sure that unprivileged software from one OS should be able to read privileged contents from another if the first one had all the chances to wipe it from memory.
Alternatively the GPU or driver could, at initialisation time, wipe the memory.