When users interact with a server,  either exposed to the Internet or within an intranet, privacy issues arise. They become extremely worrying in public clouds, where data are provided to an infrastructure hosted outside user's premises. The right to act without observation becomes even more important in Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) environments.  When somebody stores personal information on her account at a DaaS like VDD, she would be sure that her data would remain safe and nobody but the owner can read them. It would be also desirable to make the whole list of operations performed by a user on her account, obscure or meaningless for the system administrator.
At the moment, VDD project is focusing on how to face such a problem. We have performed a preliminary experimental evaluation of a Progressive Privacy solution for a DaaS system. Progressive Privacy is a privacy preserving model which can be configurable (possibly on-demand) by a user not only quantitatively but rather qualitatively, i.e., the user is allowed to discriminate what type of information must be preserved and to what extent, according to her desired profiles of privacy. To this end, a lightweight client-side proxy named Hedge Proxy has been designed such that non-intelligible user contents and non-traceable user actions are guaranteed by enabling Homomorphic Encryption, Oblivious Transfer and Query Obfuscation schemes in the proxy.

It is now possible to visualize and use VDD desktops directly inside your browser. We have tested a number of methods and protocols to enable this feature. We evaluated VNC, RDesktop and X. VNC proved the best in terms of compression and performance. At first we chose to provide a VNC client to VDD users. We then prefered to directly resort to a web browser. So we used a VNC plugin for firefox, mozilla-gtk-vnc. We developed a simple Web GUI (see figure) and deply it on a web server on the VDD server. So just by clicking on your favourite desktop, you can see it projected directly into your browser. It is possibile to open multiple browser tabs, thus making switching among desktops confortable. We also produced a short video that shows all this.

Of course, in order to use this feature with a decent or at least acceptable performance, VDD server should be located in a network provided with a quite high upload bandwidth (which is not the case of VDD development  network, at the moment). ADSL connection services are not suitable for delivering this service on the Internet. At this page of the documentation, technical information on how to set up dispatching on the internet can be found.