By simply showing you could, it was known that your skills with the infrastructure of the day were sound. It is an old concept originating in the early 1990s, when stealing someone’s password wasn’t typically a malicious act, rather a display of your prowess. In all modern operating systems, there is something called the Secure Attention Key (SAK), which can be invoked by the user. why?”įirst, for some context, let’s take a little trip down the rabbit hole of operating-system design. Of course, there are those thinking, “Mike, this is easy, just use the PCoIP Session Variables to block the keystroke!” And you’d be right, with PCoIP, but few actually sit down and ask the simple question familiar to childhood, “But.

We all do, or should, secure our system as a good habit when we step away, but when you’re running a virtual machine, it can have an unintended consequence: the VDI session can also receive this keystroke and act on it.Ī colleague recently came to me with a question from his customer: Is it possible to script it so that VMware Horizon® Client for Windows would behave similarly to the Linux client when handling Ctrl-Alt-Del and Windows-L? That’s a loaded gun ready to fire, for those in security call this something: malware-bypassing the kernel is a big taboo. A quick press and the system is secured from any would be mischief-doers, and a smart Technical Support Engineer remembers this when he gets up from his desk in VMware GSS. The HR folks would probably be unhappy at such an unauthorized use, but a quick flip of the screen with Ctrl-Alt-Up and a dash back to your desk, leaving their display inverted and the surrounding engineers glancing over for the inevitable reaction, was worth the risk.Īll the “fun” of fixing your machine when you got back to your desk could have been prevented by hitting those three little keys we all know: Ctrl-Alt-Del. When I was still working as an Escalation Engineer for VMware® Global Support, there was a time-honored tradition among the Broomfield center’s EUC support group: If you left your computer unlocked and walked out of eyesight, you’d always come back to a surprise.

Control alt delete alternative