How the hell does Windows built-in NTFS encryption work?

I

innuendo

New Member
When you go to 'properties' in any given file there is an checkbox with an option that says 'encrypt to protect data' or something. When you use this thing the files letters turn to green.

I don't understand how this windows encryption system works, a person could take your hard drive out of your pc and hook it up in his pc and easily see all the content without having to know any admin passwords, will the windows encryption help in this case? also, are the files encrypted by the user's account password from the original pc?

wow this thing is confusing, I use some pretty good encryption programs but just wanted to know if the windows built-in encryption option on NTFS drives was worth it. I suppose it also slows down your pc because it has to encrypt/decrypt every file before and after the pc uses it.
 
I'm going to guess and say that in order for the encrypted files to be read, you need to be logged onto the account that encrypted them. It's similar as to if you take out your hard drive and put it in another PC, you cant access the "My Documents" folder, although with special apps such as Get My Data Back, you can.
 
innuendo said:
When you go to 'properties' in any given file there is an checkbox with an option that says 'encrypt to protect data' or something. When you use this thing the files letters turn to green.

I don't understand how this windows encryption system works, a person could take your hard drive out of your pc and hook it up in his pc and easily see all the content without having to know any admin passwords, will the windows encryption help in this case? also, are the files encrypted by the user's account password from the original pc?

wow this thing is confusing, I use some pretty good encryption programs but just wanted to know if the windows built-in encryption option on NTFS drives was worth it. I suppose it also slows down your pc because it has to encrypt/decrypt every file before and after the pc uses it.
Click to expand...

No... You cant do that. The file wont be read on another computer. I know a lot of people who suffer from that after they reformat and want to recover some files off of another partition.
 
Files are encrypted using a machine generated key. In normal use, it is created first time you encrypt a file. This key is protected by the password on your Windows user account. So if your Windows password is weak, so is the encryption.
 
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