Limiting Exposure of Sensitive Data Copied to the Clipboard

Copy and paste operations are disabled by default for hosts to prevent exposing sensitive data that has been copied to the clipboard.

When copy and paste is enabled on a virtual machine running VMware Tools, you can copy and paste between the guest operating system and remote console. When the console window gains focus, processes running in the virtual machine and non-privileged users can access the virtual machine console clipboard. If a user copies sensitive information to the clipboard before using the console, the use might expose sensitive data to the virtual machine. To prevent this problem, copy and paste operations for the guest operating system are disabled by default.

It is possible to enable copy and paste operations for virtual machines if necessary.