Wednesday, January 13, 2016

NVIDIA graphics card driver security bug

This one's a privacy violation bug in the graphics card driver as encountered by some university student when he tried to start up Diablo III on his computer. As he started the game, instead of the black screen, there was a screenshot of some adult site being displayed in the browser's private mode with some garbled graphics on the screen. That probably happened hours before launching the game or maybe the website itself could be something else that opened up automatically upon launching the game. This poses a big problem and what if you get caught with such stuffs opened unexpectedly without your consent like how will you explain that it is a security bug in the video card driver?
The truth is that the framebuffer from the web browser is still in the GPU memory and after launching the game, it makes use of that previous framebuffer like it transfer that framebuffer from one application to another. I don't know if the previous application like the web browser reopens again after being closed upon launching the game.
The student eventually wrote a program that erases the GPU memory once he's finished with it for a clean experience but normally, unlike the normal RAM in which you can clean up with some third-party software, it is not the same for VIDEO RAM. I don't know how did he write that program that allows you to erase some unknown garbage from the video RAM but it may look like a future opportunity for us.
NVIDIA has been already aware of this bug but they still have yet to fix it according to that student.