Shulou(Shulou.com)06/01 Report--

This week, VMware released a new fling-blind watermark based on Horizon virtual desktops.

What is a blind watermark for virtual desktops?

https://labs.vmware.com/flings/desktop-watermark

The technology behind this fling is very exciting. It can overlay a "watermark" image invisible to the naked eye on the screen of Horizon virtual desktop. More importantly, this "watermark" image is dynamically generated and can be customized by Horizon administrators. For example, the watermark image can contain the username, email address, date, machine name, IP address, etc. of the current user on the desktop. In addition, the watermark cannot be hidden by any window, it always floats above all windows.

Figure 1 Configuration of virtual desktop watermark

When a user connects to a virtual desktop using a virtual desktop client, each frame sent from the remote virtual desktop to the client contains blind watermark information. Therefore, this blind watermark information will be preserved whether the customer takes a screenshot inside the virtual machine or in the client software.

What's the use of this blind watermark?

Several employees of a company were punished for leaking screenshots of their intranet. So how does a company know who leaked its secrets? It is in the company intranet interface, using blind watermarking technology.

For security reasons, many customers are using virtual desktops to access their critical confidential content, such as sales systems, office systems, and even financial systems. The virtual desktop blind watermarking system brought by this fling will not increase the productivity of the enterprise, but it will add an invisible lock to the enterprise's anti-leakage.

Once someone leaks a screenshot of the virtual desktop and the screenshot is received by the administrator, as shown in Figure 2. The administrator can then develop the watermark using the "echo" program included with this fling. After development, the screenshot can clearly see the watermark image, see picture 3, so as to know who took this image at what time and on which machine.

Figure 2: Screenshot of a leaked virtual desktop (watermark invisible to the naked eye)

Image 3 Watermark after development

about the author

Teng Shengbo, VMware EUC Architect, Chief Development Engineer steng@vmware.com

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