Under the name “Palinopsia Bug” a group of developers report about graphics adapters that remember the contents of your screen even after rebooting the computer. This is achieved by simply accessing the content of the graphic card’s frame buffer. While currently being just a proof of concept, the “Palinopsia Bug” could be a potential severe security issue.
A team of developers on
hsmr.cc wrote a small tool that makes it possible togain direct access to the graphic card’s screen buffer. The tool enables the developers to read and display frames that were recently – however before the latest reboot – rendered by the graphics card. During their tests they were able to reproduce this issue with the following drivers:
