The password lives in the owner's ~/.vnc, and the sidecar is the process that
writes it — together with the rfbauth file x11vnc actually authenticates
against. Officer read the plaintext half directly and answered with it before
ever asking the sidecar, which is both a secret the proxy has no business
opening and a way to hand out a password that no longer matches: if `passwd`
went missing while `password` survived, officer kept serving the old plaintext
and the desktop refused every login. `vnc:ensure-password` reconciles the pair,
so ask it every time and delete the reader.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>