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There's a number of advantages to installing Guest Additions in VirtualBox guests:

  • one can copy-paste between host and guest
  • one can run guest as fullscreen

There must a whole lot more, so that makes me wonder if there are situations where one wouldn't use the feature.

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Security: when you open a communication channel, undesirables can use it too. In particular, if you're using a virtual machine to contain an untrusted operating system or application, the guest additions introduce several risks.

  • There is more code in the security containment (the trusted base), so more risk of bugs that could let code inside the virtual machine affect the host.
  • Additional features can be used for their intended purpose, but in an unintended manner. For example an application inside the virtual machine can snoop on all clipboard content of the host.
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    Tip for all: it is worth to consider turning off Cliboard synchronization. You can do this in settings of given virtual machine. Commented Aug 10, 2012 at 10:09

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