[Gllug] Secure filing system?

[Christopher Hunter]

On Sun, 2011-02-13 at 18:47 +0000, Chris Bell wrote:
> Hello,
>    My local council has been fined 80,000 pounds after the thefts of a
> couple of laptops containing insecure, unencrypted, data on residents. Does
> any secure encrypted filing system exist on Microsoft?

There are a couple that purport to be secure, but if you have physical
access (like a stolen laptop) and a bit of basic savvy, none of them
really are.  

Most of the "secure" systems rely on passwords - ophcrack deals with
those on any Windows machine, often in seconds.  Some of them use
encrypted files - none of these are effectively secure if you have a bit
of time and a reasonably quick machine.  

The most expensive "protection" uses encrypted partitions, but these are
generally crackable - again with time and effort.

Basically - if you can be bothered - any Windows data is recoverable,
and none of the "security" products actually works properly.  

There used to be one product, used by the American military (can't
remember the name of it, though), that reformatted a partition in a
modified form of XFS.  It was horribly slow, though quite secure, but
was dropped when XFS was open-sourced!

Chris

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