The Minority Report

I figure since I covered part one of Nadim’s Top 10 RDP Protocol Misconceptions, I should probably point you to part deux.

As always, I’m clipping and jiving on this one so you have to go visit his post for the full enchillada.

Nadim here again. Today we’re wrapping up our Top 10 list of RDP Misconceptions. So without further ado…

1) Myth: RDP is insecure; there is no encryption

To be clear, this is totally false! RDP has always supported strong encryption and is by default encrypted!

…

Current versions of RDP have even stronger encryption and server authentication options out of the box. This is because they are built on top of a security mechanism in Windows called CredSSP which uses Kerberos or TLS (aka SSL) for authentication – when you use those settings RDP is using the same or stronger encryption that your browser uses when communicating with your bank.

2) Myth: RDP performance hasn’t changed much over the releases

…

Here’s just one example of the bandwidth difference for a common scenario across several releases of RDP. We essentially have in these scenarios gains of between 8% to 45% bandwidth improvement from switching to the latest protocol. See the RDP Performance Whitepaper for more details on this data.

3) Myth: RDP is only used in Remote Desktop Services (formerly TS)

RDP is actually used under the hood in pretty much every Microsoft product that benefits from desktop or application remoting.

…

4) Myth: I can’t customize or program extensions to RDP

There are actually several useful ways to extend/or customize RDP:

· Programming the RDP Client: Host the RDP ActiveX control in your web page or application.

· Programming the RDP Server side: Use the Windows Desktop Sharing API

This blog post by Seenu has a lot of good detail and examples on how you can use our Windows Desktop Sharing API to write custom collaboration or desktop sharing applications, these APIs are all built on the same core RDP protocol that powers Windows Remote Desktop.

· Write a dynamic virtual channel extension to RDP

Probably the most powerful way to extend RDP is to actually write a virtual channel plug-in extension to RDP. This allows you to extend the protocol with your own bi-directional channel that can communicate from client to server. The possibilities are limitless but some examples include supporting new devices over RDP. We have a nice blog post with an overview of the dynamic virtual channel API or the docs are in MSDN.

5) Myth: The RDP protocol is not publicly documented

If you’re curious to learn more about very low-level technical details of RDP, we have thousands of pages of detailed specifications up on MSDN. For example, you can see the documents for the core protocol sequence and basic graphics here.
Terminal Services Team Blog : Top 10 RDP Protocol Misconceptions – Part 2