Microsoft has improved continuously and released new features to Windows Virtual Desktop, their front running product, to face the pandemic while making Work from Home a reality. From this post, let's discuss one of the new features released recently to block Screen capture on a WVD session.

Windows Virtual Desktop is a full cloud Azure-based DAAS/PAAS solution. It has both features of the Remote desktop solution and a Virtual desktop solution. WVD offers full desktop virtualization with Windows 10 Images; this has been more enhanced with multi-session Windows 10. Not only desktops, but you can also move your RDS environment to WVD with the same experience while reducing complex deployment components.

The Screen Protection feature prevents users from using print screens or screen snips to capture the WVD session screens to their own later use. This is very simple to implement, just a registry change. And while doing so, users can capture all other screens except for the WVD session. The session will be blacked as the above snap.

Before Enable

Before enabling screen protection, you need to consider the following things are in order.

1. The host pool should be deployed as a Validation environment.
   This is available when you are creating the Host pool.
   
   
   
   

   Also, you can change it later from Host pool properties.
   
   
   
   

2. Windows Desktop Client version 2.1526 and above
   

   You need to have Windows Desktop Client 1.2.1526 version or above to consume this feature. As of today, this is not publicly available. You need to download and install it from the following link
   

   https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/remote/remote-desktop-services/clients/windowsdesktop-whatsnew
   
   
   
   
   

Enable Screen Protection

To enable the screen protection, you need to add the following registry key to the WVD host where users are connecting.

reg add "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows NT\Terminal Services" /v fEnableScreenCaptureProtection /t REG_DWORD /d 1

There are few ways you can add this change to the WVD Hosts.

• Add the registry change to the reference image.
  If you have a reference machine where you are using to capture the golden image to deploy WVD hosts, you can update it with this registry change and capture the OS to deploy all the WVD Hosts VM’s.
  
  
• Push the Registry change from GPO
  you can create a Group Policy and push it centrally through Active Directory Domain Services. 
  
  
  
• Manually do the Registry change on each WVD Hosts.
  If you have a reference machine where you are using to capture the golden image to deploy WVD hosts, you can update it with this registry change and capture the OS to deploy all the WVD Hosts VM’s.
  
  
  

After the registry change, You can instantly check the result by connecting to the WVD session through the Windows Desktop Client.

I hope this post is useful. 

Cheers

Asitha De Silva