State of the Art of Anti-Screen Capture Protection Techniques

The transition toward a contactless society has been rapidly progressing owing to the recent COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, the IT environment of organizations and enterprises is changing rapidly; in particular, data security is expanding to the private sector. To adapt to these changes, organizations and companies have started to securely transfer confidential data to residential PCs and personally owned devices of employees working from home or from other locations. Therefore, organizations and companies are introducing streaming data services, such as the virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) or cloud services, to securely connect internal and external networks. These methods have the advantage of providing data without the need to download to a third terminal; however, while the data are being streamed, attacks such as screen shooting or capturing are performed. Therefore, there is an increasing interest in prevention techniques against screen capture threats that may occur in a contactless environment. In this study, we analyze possible screen capture methods in a PC and a mobile phone environment and present techniques that can protect the screens against specific attack methods. The detection and defense for screen capture of PC applications on Windows OS and Mac OS could be solved with a single agent using our proposed techniques. Screen capture of mobile devices can be prevented by applying our proposed techniques on Android and iOS.