Hello Nick & Gabriel,

before thinking about encryption, what is the user and authorization concept 
for that share? Can every user see and change all other users files? Or are the 
paths somehow distinct for all users, disallowing sharing? The doc only states, 
the guacd process needs to be able to read/write the directory, nothing else.

In fact I never enabled that drive, because I never understood and thus 
referred my users to using standard shares that support ACLs (and all the 
shares are ultimately protected by Bitlocker, as is my Guacamole setup as it 
runs on Hyper-V).

Thanks,

Joachim

 

Von: gabriel sztejnworcel <> 
Gesendet: Wednesday, 4 May 2022 13:16
An: [email protected]
Betreff: Re: File Encryption for RDP Redirected Folders

 

Thanks for your answer Nick!

It's not so clear to me how this can be implemented only on the remote server 
side since files are uploaded by Guacamole without any involvement of the 
remote server, unless it somehow monitors the folder and each time a new file 
is created it encrypts it immediately.

I will look into it, thanks!

 

On Wed, 4 May 2022 at 00:04, Nick Couchman <[email protected] 
<mailto:[email protected]> > wrote:

On Tue, May 3, 2022 at 3:50 PM gabriel sztejnworcel <[email protected] 
<mailto:[email protected]> > wrote:

Hi,

 

Was there ever a discussion or suggestion to implement encryption for files 
transferred in RDP sessions through redirected folders? So that if someone gets 
access to the Guacamole server, they won't be able to get these files, which 
might contain sensitive information.

I thought of creating a key for each session, when the file is uploaded - use 
the key to encrypt it. When the file is read from within the RDP session - 
decrypt the requested portion. The encryption itself might be challenging as it 
needs to be in parts.

 

For download - maybe it's possible to stream the file to Guacamole client 
immediately and not store it on disk instead of encrypting it.

 

Wondering if someone ever tried it or if someone else thinks it's useful.

 

 

Well, you could do this entirely on the remote desktop side and it shouldn't be 
a problem, you'd just have to install some sort of encryption software that 
encrypts the files before they land on the redirected folder. The redirected 
folder is really just an internal file share presented by the RDP client 
(\\tsclient\share <file://tsclient/share> ), so you just need some way to 
enable, encourage, and/or enforce encryption on the RDS host. It's been a 
little while since I messed around with client encryption software, but back in 
the day there were Open Source items like TrueCrypt and VeraCrypt that could do 
this cross-platform, and I know there are also commercial solutions. While this 
method is somewhat disruptive - it means additional software/steps for the user 
- it is the most secure, as it allows for encryption on a per-user basis, which 
means that no one, not even the root user of the guacd server, can decrypt the 
files.

 

Beyond that I suppose guacd could be extended to support transparent encryption 
of the files as they land; however, this would mean that the encryption keys 
for the files would be stored on the guacd server, so if someone compromised 
that server, they could still get access to the files and decrypt them. I think 
some filesystems - like ZFS - support transparent at-rest encryption and can 
manage access to keys, use hardware keys, etc., so there may be some 
possibilities, there, as well. This is a bit out of my areas of 
experience/expertise, though.

 

-Nick

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