On Wednesday 14 January 2004 8:41 pm, Nano Nano wrote: > On Wed, Jan 14, 2004 at 08:38:29PM -0700, Wesley J Landaker wrote: > Content-Description: signed data > [snip] > > > The contents of video ram aren't initialized by the hardware. They > > just come up in a random state are and just going to be > > overwritten--why would the video card both to zero it out? > > Isn't that a security problem? What if the old contents contained > the image of the root password or other sensitive information? Then it would be there until it got over-written. Just like when you type in your root password or any other sensitive information, the local computer has it in memory until it gets overwritten. So, yes, it's important to make sure that unprivileged processes can't just randomly read video ram, just like you wouldn't let them randomly read memory. =) -- Wesley J. Landaker - wjl@icecavern.net OpenPGP FP: 4135 2A3B 4726 ACC5 9094 0097 F0A9 8A4C 4CD6 E3D2
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