Citrix ICA File Interceptor v2

November 3, 2021

If you’ve already read the description of the first version of this utility, here’s what’s new:

A new “HDX over UDP” setting has been added. Its possible values are Unchanged (as for all other settings), Preferred (which allows for TCP fallback and is the most common default), On (which prevents TCP fallback), and Off (which only allows TCP connections).

The Session Size setting now also offers a “Screen Percent” option.

A new “Extra Settings” capability, accessed from the ICAceptor tray icon’s context menu, allows specifying arbitrary additional ICA session settings to supplement those that can be specified via the Settings GUI. As seen in the screenshot below, this feature is implemented using a new self-explanatory ExtraSettings.ini file stored in %AppData%\ICAceptor. Its settings are applied last to intercepted ICA files before they’re launched, so they will override any identical settings also specified via the GUI.

Finally, a new “Test Mode” feature, also accessed from the tray menu, will open modified ICA files in Notepad rather than launch them with the registered Citrix client.

Download ICAceptor v2

Now for some “bad news”:

Be Aware:

We are told that an (at this writing) upcoming Citrix Workspace App update will unconditionally process downloaded ICA “files” entirely in memory without their ever being stored on disk, thus precluding their being intercepted by ICAceptor. Since this is billed as a security feature designed to prevent ICA files from being intercepted and launched from a different machine by malicious actors, we won’t be providing any workaround we may develop to defeat this new behavior for legitimate purposes.

If you’re in IT (i.e. know what you’re doing) and need to continue taking advantage of the session tweaking and troubleshooting capabilities that ICAceptor makes possible, the “Improved ICA file security” section of this Citrix article which describes the upcoming new behavior in some detail might give you a useful idea. 😉

Follow Jacques Bensimon on Twitter @JacqBens for more great Windows insights and tricks.

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