TightVNC Frequently Asked Questions

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Important Note

This page is under construction. To get more information about TightVNC, please consider visiting the RealVNC FAQ (most of the infomation there is applicable to TightVNC as well).

Contents

• How secure is TightVNC?
• How can I hide the system tray icon in WinVNC?
• Do you plan to port TightVNC to MacOS X?

How secure is TightVNC?

Although TightVNC encrypts passwords sent over the net, the rest of the traffic is sent as is, unencrypted (for password encryption, VNC uses a DES-encrypted challenge-response scheme, where the password is limited by 8 characters, and the effective DES key length is 56 bits). So using TightVNC over the Internet can be a security risk. To solve this problem, we plan to work on built-in encryption in future versions of TightVNC.

In the mean time, if you need real security, we recommend installing OpenSSH, and using SSH tunneling for all TightVNC connections from untrusted networks.

How can I hide the system tray icon in WinVNC?

Win32 TightVNC includes code from TridiaVNC distributions, and therefore it should include Tridia's modification to disable the tray icon. Here is a quote from TridiaVNC 1.3.3 announce:

• Added registry flag to cleanly disable the tray icon on all platforms and in all modes without affecting other settings. The default is "0" and indicates that the tray icon should not be disabled. A value of "1" will suppress the tray icon for all users.

      HKLM\SOFTWARE\ORL\WinVNC3\DisableTrayIcon DWORD "0"
      HKLM\SOFTWARE\ORL\WinVNC3\DisableTrayIcon DWORD "1"

Thus, to disable the tray icon, you should start the "regedit" utility from the command line, go to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\ORL\WinVNC3\ folder, and create a DWORD parameter with the name "DisableTrayIcon" and the value "1". Then, after restarting WinVNC, the icon will not be shown anymore.

But please note that hiding the icon is usually not a good idea. For example, if you want to restrict users from changing the server Properties, it might be better to use the AllowProperties setting. For more information, see the description of "AllowProperties", "AllowShutdown" and "AllowEditClients" options in the RealVNC documentation.

Do you plan to port TightVNC to Mac OS X?

It is possible that TightVNC will include a Mac OS X version, but not in the nearest days. Currently, our team is busy working on Win32 and Unix versions. So please consider looking at other VNC projects providing Mac OS X ports. For example, see:

• OSXvnc

However, if all you need is to use a Mac machine as a VNC viewer, use the Java viewer interface of TightVNC, it should work under both Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X.