Filtered articles: "Encryption"

Filtered articles: "Encryption"
Using Certificates with Windows

After I have spend several parts of this series discussing the theory of certificates, certificate authorities, certificate requests and file formats, this article focusses on Windows and how it handles certificates. I will also present several pitfalls that can make your life miserable when working with certificates and what tools are available by Microsoft.
nicholas's picture
What Certificates Are and How They Work
Published by Nicholas Dille on 12/13/2011 | 1 Comments | 1,670 Views

In the recent past I have realized that certificates are poorly understood. But accompany us in our everyday life. In the case of IT pros this is very unsettling because they are expected to handle them with ease.

The first and most important concept about certificates is that you need to be thinking about two pieces of information. The certificate is the public part and it always has a matching private key. You may or may not require both for your needs – but continue reading and find out.
nicholas's picture
Backup to Microsoft SkyDrive – But Encrypted!
Published by Marcel Meurer on 12/23/2010 | 4 Comments | 5,457 Views

 

The Challenge:
I'm using a notebook for my work and mostly save my data to the local disc. For security reasons, this drive is encrypted using EFS technology which is build-in in Windows 7. When I'm in the office in Cologne, I'm able to sync my business related data against the file server. But I also carry some personal files on the disk. For these files (like banking data) I searched for a simple solution to save them.
Microsoft SkyDrive
I found Microsoft's service SkyDrive (http://skydrive.live.com), which offers a capacity of 25 GByte for files, photos, videos and documents for free. There is also a tool from Microsoft called Mesh, which can synchronize local folders from different computers with SkyDrive.
Improve Security – But how?
This works well, but I'm not sure if it is a good idea to copy sensitive personal data to the cloud. But what could I do? My first idea was to use an encryption software which can map a virtual drive to an encrypted container.
But there are two disadvantages for this simple solution:

The Challenge:

I'm using a notebook for my work and mostly save my data to the local disc. For security reasons, this drive is encrypted using EFS technology which is build-in in Windows 7. When I'm in the office in Cologne, I'm able to sync my business related data against the file server. But I also carry some personal files on the disk. For these files (like banking data) I searched for a simple solution to save them.
marcel's picture
Cleaning up the Mess Left Behind by Multiple EFS Certificates
Published by Helge Klein on 05/13/2009 | 2 Comments | 3,024 Views

In case you have (un?)wittingly been juggling around with multiple EFS certificates like me, you may feel a strong urge to clean up the mess. Which mess? It can happen quite easily that different files are encrypted with different keys. In addition to that, directories that are marked for encryption have EFS certificates associated with them, and there is no UI to manipulate that. In order to straighten this out, once the proper certificate is in place each file and directory needs to be "touched" in order to update their encryption keys.
helge's picture
Tales from the Crypt - EFS and the Upgrade to Windows 7 RC

How can you mess up a simple OS upgrade by using encryption? Simple. Here is what happened to me when I upgraded my Windows 7 beta system to the RC version.
helge's picture

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