Citrix XenClient - Secure Application Sharing
Ensuring secure desktop computing is a top objective for IT professionals. This demonstration by Peter Blum highlights how Citrix XenClient allows users to securely access business applications, even when using their desktops for personal use.
Tags: xendesktop seamless secure secure application sharing citrix xenclient
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Transcript : So now I’d like to show you how XenClient can allow you to interact with both business applications and personal applications in the same view. The secure, seamless capability allows you to have strict isolation between the two environments and have a really great user experience. So here I am back in my Vista personal environment. In some of the other demos you can see that you can very easily switch between the business and personal environments. So you’re switching full screen between the applications. We’ve also got a mode of operation where you can view the business applications and the personal applications in the same place. So, you can have your iTunes running and access your business applications. One of the things we’re doing that’s a little different is we’re doing a secure, seamless capability. So what I’ve done, this is a personal environment. It’s very open. I can install my own applications, which is good and bad. I can install iTunes, but, you know, I might also have stuff like spyware and malware that I didn’t plan to install. So, we’ve actually put some malware in here. It’s a keyboard logger. So, what happens is, everything I type at the keyboard when I’m in my personal environment is logged and sent to a remote web site. So what I’m going to do here is go to a secure web page. And, you know, it says https://, and I think everything’s nice and secure, and so I go and type in my user name and my password. And you can see that the keyboard logger is actually able to grab all of that information. So all my passwords are being stored, and, you know, sent to the hackers, basically. So, you know, IT doesn’t really care if that happens in my personal environment. But it’s certainly going to be a big issue for my business applications. But with our secure, seamless capability—I’m going to start up Internet Explorer here—what it’s actually doing, it launched this application in that second business virtual machine, but it’s displaying here the business applications alongside the personal application. And what you’ll notice is it’s got this green border around it. So that let’s me know this is an application coming from a different virtual machine. And so, what you’ll notice, if I type in the web site here, and I go and type in my user name and password, the key logger isn’t able to get it. And the reason is because when I click in this window, we’ve got some virtual private keyboard technology that every time I click in that window, everything that I’m typing on the keyboard gets sent directly to the business virtual machine. It never even enters this personal environment that’s been compromised. So now you have the ability to run your personal applications, your business applications side by side, but with all the lockdown, security, and control that IT wants, to ensure the business data is kept safe. So thanks a lot for taking a look at the XenClient secure, seamless application demo. We invite you to visit citrix.com/xenclient to learn a lot more about this exciting new technology.
anonymous - Huh? Am I missing a point here?<div>So you just demonstrated how an attacker can steal usernames and passwords if I access my public cloud-based business applications from my personal OS running on XenClient!?</div><div>Maybe you could find a better example to demonstrate this capability of Secure Application Sharing.</div><div><br></div><div>Christoph</div><div><br></div>
anonymous - @anonymous, previous commenter. A keylogger on your personal OS logs all your keystrokes, what's that got to do with XenClient? How is XenClient at fault here?<div>The corporate OS is tightly locked down, patched regularly, running antivirus client, limited user rights etc. and chances of a keylogger being in there are much smaller. I think this is a good demo for people not understanding the concepts of a hypervisor, the layers provided by virtualization and how this enables "Secure Application Sharing".</div>
jeffanthonyfds - Yes Cristoph you are correct but I think missing the point. You would not want to access your cloud-based business applications from your personal environment, you would prefer using the locked-down corporate environment.<br><br>In the event you need many users to access your cloud using virtualization you can now be sure that any malware they may have picked up will not affect your cloud, even to the point where a keylogger will not work. <br><br>Jeff<br>