Tuesday, November 04, 2003

Encrypted File System

Playing around with Microsoft's EFS (Encrypted File System) again. I'm still trying to answer the question of whether using EFS to encrypt files on a USB drive (or other removable drive) allows you to read the files back on another machine (assuming both machines belong to the same domain and the same user is logged in). So far, I haven't been able to get it to work - it seems like NTFS/EFS is tossing an extra key into the mix so that files encrypted on a drive attached to machine A can't be moved to machine B and read back.

The problem with that is when doing disaster recovery planning where I'm backing files off to a removable hard drive, I want to protect some of the files using encryption, but I can't assume that when I'm restoring from the backup drives that I'll have the original machine to attach to.

Links:

Laptop Security Guidelines

Encrypted Storage

Earlier blog entry about EFS

Even earlier blog entry about disk/file encryption

posted by Wuphon's at 8:42 PM