For me, this was a pain in the ass for a long time. When I connect to a Windows server through RDP/RDS it sometimes takes more than 2 minutes to connect to a server. Today after some waiting, and waiting and some more waiting I did a deep dive with Wireshark to figure out why it was so slow.

My setup

  • Azure domain joined Windows 10 device (Laptop)
  • Connection over a Cisco Anyconnect VPN
  • Remote Desktop Manager (Devolutions)
  • Native RDP client
  • MremoteNG

Remote VS local

I know for sure the issue should be in my setup. Because when I connect first to a jump host (RDP) and then connect to other domain-joined servers everything was connected almost immediately after I put in my user credentials.

What to do (TL;DR)

There are four things you have to modify to speed up the initial remote desktop connection speed:

  1. Disable SSL / TLS1.0
  2. Disable Netbios on the VPN network adapter
  3. Disable automatic proxy settings in Windows
  4. Change the credential to domain.local\admin or admin@domain.local instead of domain\admin

Disable SSL / TLS1.0

No, you don’t have to negotiate what protocol you have to use to connect a server. Use TLS1.2 or I don’t want to connect with you ;) So:

How to

  • Start > Run > Regedit
  • Go to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\SecurityProviders\SCHANNEL\Protocols\TLS 1.0\Client
  • If the TLS 1.0 and Client folders doesn’t exists create these keys
  • Create a 32 DWORD value with the name Enabled
  • Value data: 0 (Hex)
  • Restart the client

Disable Netbios on the VPN adapter

What I was seeing in my Wireshark capture is that RDP was trying to broadcast to get information over NETBIOS. You have a DNS server so you don’t need a legacy broadcast protocol! Unfortunately, I don’t have any screenshot of the capture but you can always check yourself ;-)

How to

Change the VPN Adapter and reboot the computer:

Disable the proxy

After connection to a server with RDP and you enter the credentials Windows is trying constantly to WPAD.domain.local to autoconfigure itself. WPAD stands for Web Proxy Auto-Discovery and I think you never want to autoconfigure a MITM ehh proxy device. You always want to have full control of your device. So, disable this to speed up the connection and make your device more secure.

How to

  • Go to settings
  • Search for proxy
  • Switch the Automatically detect settings to Off
  • Restart Windows

Change the login name

I found out that this is the most annoying and time consuming one. I always use DOMAIN\User when I connect to a server. But this is what happens:

Kerberos is doing a DNS query on _kerberos._tcp.dc._msdcs.domain.domain.tld and of course he will never can find that double domain A record. But if you change the logon name to domain.tld\admin or admin@domain.tld Kerberos will find the A record and connects immediately :)

Kerberos

And even now it’s possible to tune the Kerberos authentication further and fix the last KRB5KDC_ERR_PREAUTH_REQUIRED error you can see in the screenshot. Maybe next time but for now I’m happy with the initial connection speed :)

Happy hack ehh… connecting!