Clipboard transfer size limits
With Clipboard transfer size limits you can set limits on the size of data that can be transferred in a single copy-and-paste clipboard operation. By default, these settings are disabled and there’s no limit on client to session and session to client clipboard transfers.
Transfer size limits can help in bandwidth management. Large clipboard transfers can consume significant network bandwidth, especially in environments with many concurrent users. By setting limits, administrators can ensure smoother performance for all users and prevent network congestion.
Unrestricted clipboard transfers can potentially pose a security risk. Malicious software or unauthorized users could potentially copy large amounts of sensitive data in or out of the session. Limiting transfer sizes acts as a preventative measure against such data breaches.
When configuring clipboard transfer size limits, administrators should consider:
- User Needs: What are the typical copy-and-paste requirements of the users? Imposing overly restrictive limits can hinder productivity.
- Bandwidth usage: What is the available network bandwidth, and how many concurrent users are expected?
- Relevant Security policies: What are the organization’s data security and compliance requirements?
Two primary settings provide granular control over clipboard data transfer:
Limit clipboard client to session transfer size: This setting configures the maximum size of data, in kilobytes, that can be copied from the user’s local device (the client) and pasted into the remote session (e.g., a virtual desktop or seamless application).
Limit clipboard session to client transfer size: Secondly, this setting controls the maximum size of data, in kilobytes, that can be copied from within the remote session and pasted back to the user’s local device. This is particularly relevant when users are working with sensitive data within the virtualized environment and need to prevent large data exfiltrations to the client.
In this example, the client to session clipboard limit was restricted to 1024 kilobytes:
Note:
The size limit is based on data size (in kilobytes, KB), not a fixed character count. Due to variable character encodings (like for example, Unicode), the number of characters that can be copied will vary. For example, a 10 KB limit will hold fewer characters for Unicode text than for standard ANSI text.
In the following example, the ‘Limit clipboard session to client transfer size’ policy has been set to 1 KB.
With this clipboard transfer size limit in place, the selected text is the maximum number of characters that can be transferred from the Citrix® session on the left to the local Notepad on the right. If a user were to attempt to copy more characters from this Citrix session to his client, the text would not be truncated, but instead the entire paste operation would fail. Attempting to copy other data types, such as images or files will also fail if the content is larger than the maximum configured transfer size.
When setting this policy, consider the type of text data your users handle. If they frequently work with multilingual content or rich text, you may need to set a higher kilobyte limit to accommodate the larger data size of Unicode text.
The clipboard transfer size limits will be applied to all allowed clipboard formats.
Clipboard size limits are universally enforced across all permitted clipboard formats. This means that the limit determines the maximum amount of data that can be transferred, regardless of data type (e.g., text, images, files).