As an security researcher it is not a big surprise that Citrix with disabled copy/paste can be circumvented and small texts easily copy and pasted in both directions. But while I think most IT security researchers know that, not many use that knowledge to actually make their lifes easier. When you have been jumping through the Citrix through VPN through RDP through VNC through Citrix and back hoop for long enough, you should really make the best out of it.
So I did it again and created some new brittle shell scripts for you:
https://github.com/floyd-fuh/CitrixCopyPasta
The project is called CitrixCopyPasta and has two scripts that do the following:
- Take a screenshot of a screen area, use MacOS built-in OCR functionality and put the read out text into the clipboard. Basically a “copy” command from Citrix with disabled copy/paste.
- Emulate keyboard presses and send the clipboard content to an application on your computer. Basically a “paste” command into Citrix with disabled copy/paste.
Yes, I know, this is horribly inefficient, but that’s what companies want. Yes QR-codes would be better, yes I know Microsoft Word can auto generate QR-codes, no I wasn’t up for that. Yes it has been done before, but usually not with MacOS built-in OCR.
It’s not stupid if it works.