November 2004
Intermediate to advanced
448 pages
13h 56m
English
Content preview from Securing Windows Server 2003Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Protecting Data with the Encrypting File System
As I discussed in the previous section, NTFS checks the ACL for each file and folder a user accesses and compares it against her access token. Access is granted only when the appropriate permissions are held by the the requester. However, this architecture has the potential to be circumvented. If NTFS isn’t used to access the hard disk, the data can be read just like any other data. Because Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP allow only NTFS to access its own partitions, this security is effective. If another operating system is used, or if special disk-reading equipment is connected to the hard disk, the data is completely unprotected.
The only way to ensure that data on the hard disk is not susceptible to this type of attack is to protect it with encryption. Storing the data on the hard drive in an encrypted state means that the requester must provide the decryption key for the data to be usable. Without the decryption key, the data is useless to the requester—regardless of the operating system making the request. Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 allow files on the hard disk to be encrypted using the Encrypting File System, or EFS.
How EFS Works
To discuss the concepts and processes of EFS, I must first dispel a myth. EFS is not really a file system at all. It is a set of functions that work in conjunction with NTFS to encrypt and decrypt files that are stored on the hard drive. NTFS provides the core mechanics of fetching data from ...
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.