Okay, here you are again. Another computer from another (self-proclaimed) client for you to fix. So, let’s boot this thing and see what’s wrong with it this time. Okay, first obstacle; logging into the client’s user account. Now for me, repairs would usually pause here while I’m waiting for the moment I can get a hold of my client and ask him or her for the correct password. Annoying…
Ultimate Fish Battle Royale
Is NTFS really secure?
I have Mac PC, in which I have created a Windows partition and have installed Windows using Boot Camp. If I log in to the Mac OS, I can read all the files from the Windows partition from Mac. If I compare the same scenario from within Windows, Windows claims to secure a user’s private files (stored in My Documents for instance) from other users with equal or less privilege. I was expecting to see the same protection from Mac as well. I was expecting an error message in Mac to show that these files are inaccessible, if I try to see or open them. Can someone explain if my perception is right or am I missing something?
While the question specifically mentions NTFS the answer applies to almost every file system that is able to be accessed by another operating system and has not had native support for that file system built in.
The same would apply to EXT2/3/4 (Linux) support on Windows, HFS (Mac) support on Linux or any combination of file systems that are standard for one system and just barely “supported” on another.
In a comment to my last post Compression and Encryption, nhinkle asked:
Do you know then how encrypted ZIP files work? Encryption seems to be built into many encryption formats like zip, rar, 7z, etc. Do these usually compress and then encrypt, or somehow do both at once?
Well, ZIP handles this in its own special way. First let’s look at how a ZIP file is made up. A ZIP file consists of one or more ‘file entries’ – blocks of data that make up the actual content of the zip file, followed by a final ‘central directory’:
As you can see each file in the ZIP file has its own local header which contains the information about how the file is compressed. This allows each file in the ZIP file to be compressed in a different way – from “Store” (no compression – ideal for adding pre-compressed files) right up to the maximum and slowest compression available.
