Windows Vista Security: Praxisorientierte Sicherheit für Profis

Controlling Access to Your Data

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Inherited Permissions

By default, all files and folders contained in a folder inherit the permissions assigned

during installation or assigned by you when you modify folder permissions. For a

disk or other storage device, the top-level folder for inherited permissions is the root

folder. For example, the top-level folder for the C: drive is the C:\ folder. Any permis-

sions assigned to this folder are inherited by all other folders on the C: drive auto-

matically. The same is true when you assign permissions to folders at any other level

of the folder hierarchy. For example, if you change the permissions for the C:\Data

folder, all files and folders contained in the C:\Data folder inherit these permissions

by default.

When you are working with permissions, you can easily determine whether a permis-

sion is inherited. Inherited permissions are shaded (unavailable) and directly

assigned permissions are not shaded. If you don’t want a file or a folder to have the

same permissions as a parent folder, you have several choices. You can:

• Access the parent folder and configure the permissions you want all included

files and folders to have.

• Try to override an inherited permission by selecting the opposite permission. In

most cases, Deny overrides Allow.

• Stop inheriting permissions from the parent folder and then copy or remove

existing permissions as appropriate.

If you want a file or a folder to stop inheriting permissions from a parent folder, fol-

low these steps:

1. In Windows Explorer, right-click the file or folder you want to work with and

then select Properties.

2. In the Properties dialog box, select the Security tab and then click Advanced.

This opens the “Advanced Security Settings for” dialog box.

3. On the Permissions tab, click Edit. This opens an editable view of the Permis-

sions tab in a new dialog box.

4. Clear the “Include inheritable permissions from this object’s parent” checkbox.

5. In the Windows Security dialog box, shown in Figure 11-8, click Copy to copy

over the permissions that were applied previously through inheritance, or click

Remove to remove the inherited permissions and apply only the permissions that

you explicitly set on the folder or file.

6. After you modify or remove additional permissions as necessary, click OK to

save your settings.