Questions tagged [efs]
EFS (or Encrypting File System) is a feature included in some high-end versions of Windows Vista and 7 which allows the user to encrypt data on a filesystem level.
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After reinstalling windows on my pc I can no longer decrypt a folder I have a valid pfx key for
The title says it all, I reinstalled windows on my PC by wiping the drive and starting fresh. Before doing that, I copied the certificate key for my encrypted folder. Now on the new windows ...
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51 views
Decrypting EFS files on a non-bootable former windows drive
There are many questions like this one but this one is mine. Here is the situation:
I had some valuable files on my Windows 10 system that I encrypted with windows built-in EFS. Now that drive has ...
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31 views
Windows 10 DRA will decrypt on/from one Machine, but not another
I am in a home user environment where I use Data Recovery Agent (DRA). I set up all my machines to use EFS. On one machine I have successfully:
Setup DRA
Encrypt files on a per user basis
Can ...
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1answer
41 views
Accessing EFS encrypted files using only the Administrator password
Is it possible to decrypt a file that was encrypted with Windows' EFS using only the administrator password for the account that the file was encrypted with?
EDIT: If it is possible: What is the exact ...
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119 views
Windows 10: command line equivalent to “file ownership: personal”
I am using windows 10 (pro, 1909, 18363.836) on a surface pro 3 and I have my home directory encrypted with EFS. I would like to make a subfolder that is not encrypted.
cipher /d /s:folder does ...
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1answer
219 views
Access files encrypted with Windows EFS (Encrypting File System) on Linux
I have a PC with multiple hard drives containing files encrypted with EFS. If I install Linux, is there a way to access these files?
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41 views
Removing Windows 7 file encryption pop-up
I've started receiving this pop-up a couple of days ago, and it's annoying. To the best of my knowledge, I have not installed anything recently, nor have I dealt with EFS in any manner.
Following ...
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2answers
953 views
decrypting EFS encrypted files on windows 10
I have encrypted a folder in my external hard disk consisting sub folders and my personal images and videos on my windows 10, i have no knowledge of taking a backup of key or certificate and formatted ...
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209 views
A Decryption Catch-22: EFS vs Windows Bitlocker
I have myself in a bit of a pickle. My primary hard drive is encrypted with Windows 10 Bitlocker, and the text file with my recovery key, on an external drive, has turned out to be encrypted with ...
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1answer
130 views
Windows encrypted files can't be opened on macOS
I have encrypted certain folders in my hard drive using Windows encryption. I also created an encryption certificate .pfx so that I could read those files by installing the certificate. I want to open ...
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94 views
How to solve permission error when my user is owner of the file and I can't access from administrator user either
I used Microsoft encryption to encrypt my Office files but now it says you need permission to open this file while opening. I am opening the file with the user which is owner of the files and I have ...
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1answer
88 views
How are individual files encrypted?
I think the process is called EFS and in most cases the encryption of the key used to encrypt the file by an asymmetric cipher but what I don't understand is how exactly the files are encrypted.
Now ...
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85 views
use EFS certificate on multiple computers to encrypt and read files
What I want is to create a single EFS cert for use on multiple computers to encrypt/decrypt files.
I have two computers, PC1 and PC2, and when I try to copy PC1's encrypted files to PC2, these files ...
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1answer
64 views
Why does an EFS-encrypted file get decrypted when it gets uploaded to the Internet?
Why is an EFS-encrypted file decrypted when it gets uploaded to the Internet?
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1answer
73 views
Will the contents of an encrypted file from a local disk be visible to others when uploaded to the Internet?
If I encrypt the contents of a file through File Explorer in Windows 10 (Properties -> Attributes -> Advanced) and upload it to the internet (cloud, attachment in an email, etc.), will I still be the ...
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1answer
51 views
Are there any major risks to running a windows service as the login user?
Are there any risks to running a service as the admin (and login) user on a Windows 10 machine? For instance, will the password be stored on disk in a manner accessible to someone with physical access ...
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1answer
64 views
Can I give the EFS public key to others?
Using EFS to encrypt a file on Windows 10. Does EFS use public/private key pairs? If it does, does that mean I can give the public part of the key to others, so they can encrypt files and send them ...
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727 views
How to use windows 10 personal certificates to encrypt a file
Using Windows 10 "Manage your file encryption certificates", I have a valid certificate. How do I use this certificate to encrypt a file?
I have tried:
Right click file
Select properties
Select ...
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16 views
System won't restart after Windows Update. Is there a way to pull EFS files off the system?
I'm trying to fix a system where the user account was encrypted using Windows 10's cipher command.
The user tried to update Windows and it got stuck in a reboot loop. As Windows can't start, I cannot ...
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1answer
121 views
Problems with Encrypted Files
I was having problems with my main drive and decided to upgrade to a new SSD for my boot drive. Upon installing Windows I realized I could not access any of my encrypted files due to not having that ...
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2answers
193 views
EFS recovery in windows 7 after reinstalling windows
My brother formatted my PC, removed the older version of windows 7 and installed a new version. Before he formatted it, I encrypted some files using EFS in windows 7, I was using an account name: AAAA....
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1answer
481 views
Unable to decrypt EFS files with cipher command
I tried to decrypt a EFS file with the built-in cipher command: cipher -d "D:\sample.txt", and here's the output:
Listing C:\Windows\System32\
New files added to this directory will not be encrypted.
...
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1answer
453 views
Is there any benefit of using bitlocker and efs together?
Example: Bitlocker: during encryption process, the pc got shutdown suddenly due to power failure, part of the data will be left unencrypted, which intruder can gain access to.
I'm thinking will ...
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1answer
195 views
Creating a .pfx or PKCS#12 file from PFX or other external
Reading the fine manual, I can copy and/or export all the required credentials to another Windows machine for import after exporting:
Figure 1: Exporting the Encrypting File System key
Right-...
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2k views
How to decrypt EFS encrypted files from Linux
Because the regular decrypt procedure with cipher fails, looking for alternatives. Along the lines of this exercise:
Goal
You have succeeded once you know the content of the encrypted file...
...
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1answer
101 views
EFS sync task failing with Restart Call
We have on-premise sync agent running. Every now and then sync task is failing with Restart call (Shows under activity under history tab).
What could be the issue ? I could not find any information ...
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2answers
888 views
EFS file security not retained when transferring, what's the point?
I only recently decided to implement EFS as a security measure, but during testing with an encrypted file, I found these shortcomings:
You can copy an encrypted file to a USB drive, then transfer it ...
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67 views
EFS-encrypted files jumbled right after encryption
One of our users was running Windows 10 Home. She upgraded to Windows 10 Professional specifically for EFS.
With the upgrade complete, she right-clicked on her Documents folder, Properties, Advanced, ...
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1k views
Domain Administrator unable to decrypt files with EFS recovery certificate
I have some files on the drive of a domain controller running Windows Server 2008 R2 which are encrypted via EFS. The user that originally encrypted the files no longer exists. When I look at the ...
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1answer
2k views
How do I keep 2 EFS instances in sync across regions
My company has an application running with multiple EC2 instances sharing 1 EFS instance that holds our application's files in the US East region, however our application is used nationally and our ...
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1answer
3k views
Could EFS files be opened on a different PC?
Let's suppose I've used EFS (Encrypt contents to secure data) to encrypt a folder containing several files on my Windows 7 / 10 PC.
I then copy the encrypted folder to an external hard drive. The ...
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494 views
Windows 10 not using imported cert to decrypt EFS files
I encrypted some files with Windows's built-in EFS encryption, which involved creating a new EFS certificate and saving a backup of it somewhere. I recently swapped motherboards/re-imaged my PC and ...
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1answer
1k views
how to decrypt an encrypted file from a old account
So awhile back I was just testing out the encryption thing to just see what all it did and how it works etc. Little did I know I forgot to decrypt them before I formatted disk. I do still have all the ...
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1answer
286 views
Temporarily read an EFS-encrypted folder on someone else's computer
Example situation:
You have an external USB hard drive with a folder D:\Work\ encrypted with EFS, and you want to copy a few files from it to your colleague Bob's computer
You plug the external USB ...
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1answer
182 views
Setting up EBS/EFS disk storage for disaster recovery
I am thinking about how to best setup a couple of environments on AWS. I would like to setup two servers:
Application server (running web application and REST services)
Tools server (running several ...
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1answer
715 views
How to use a hard drive containing EFS-encrypted files on another computer?
I'm starting to use EFS feature to encrypt several folders of my hard drive, using Right click > Properties > Advanced > Encrypt contents to secure data (see screenshot).
At the end of the process, a ...
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1answer
131 views
Enable EFS for whole system partition
When I try to apply EFS for the Windows system partition, there's many files error with "access denied". How to override the restriction?
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1answer
93 views
Is it possible to re-create certificate that was created with EFS?
I have some files that are encrypted with EFS. I do not have the certificate to decrypt. But I do know the username, computer name, password, etc. that were used when the files were created. Is there ...
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1answer
992 views
Windows server 2012 DRA (Data recovery agent) account not able to decrypt files
I have a Windows Server 2012 R2, Hyper V VM acting as a domain controller (for domain parihar.local). I am setting up EFS (Encrypted File System) on the same and am running into a very specific issue ...
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137 views
broken encrypted files after reformat
I had some files encrypted with cipher cmd command on an external hard drive with FAT32 format. one day I had to copy a large file on that hard drive and I reformated the hard drive to NTFS format. ...
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1answer
335 views
what happen if I use 7zip to compress EFS-encrypted files to create a new zip
is the EFS-encrypted files decrypted automatically and save to the new zip file?
So I can give the zip file to another user/external parties, to open it without any EFS keys?
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1answer
432 views
Windows 7 EFS, where are the FEK stored?
I feel confuse, I read from many technical doc from Microsoft and wiki. The FEK is generated for each file, and store in the file headers.
But refer to this blog windows-7-how-to-use-cipher-exe-a-...
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How does EFS use the user account to decrypt files?
My company uses pGina on its Windows machines so that we can log in using our LDAP accounts without Active Directory. Last week I accidentally entered my account password unmasked while SSH'd into one ...
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1answer
236 views
Windows 7 Unzip downloaded archives are Encrypted - EFS
Basically when I download a zip archive, typically in chrome, but this happens in Mozilla as well, the files in the archive are encrypted (EFS) when I unzip them. Not password protected or anything ...
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1answer
480 views
container mounting fails after moving Docker files (images) to AWS EFS NFS mounted volume
Recently switched my AWS EC2 ubuntu 14.04 instance from using a ebs volume to the newish EFS. That all works great and I moved for example all my owncloud data there.
Now I wanted to move my docker ...
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548 views
Recover Encrypted Data from windows.old (WIN10)
I recently had to reinstall windows 10 because it became unusable. I've got all my data back from windows.old and other sources but... Without me realizing it, windows had encrypted some of the data ...
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3k views
How to copy encrypted files to shared folder retaining encryption?
I'm copying a folder from local HDD to a remote shared folder. Both systems are Windows 7 SP1, members of the same domain, I am logged in as a domain user and the files are owned by that user. There ...
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626 views
How do I recover Windows EFS keys
Long before my hard drive crashed I backed it up using Acronis TrueImage 2010, a full partition backup of Windows 7 Professional 64bits.
Oddly enough, the C OS partition is the placed as the second ...
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1answer
927 views
EFS and encrypting new files automatically
I have an issue where files are not always being encrypted. I did a right-click and set the folder to encrypt all sub-folders and files when they are dropped in.
As of right now, new files are not ...
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1answer
128 views
Is the EFS key of all accounts associated with the same Microsoft account the same?
My boot hard drive stopped working but I had backed up all the files on an external hard drive and encrypted it with EFS prior to this. I unfortunately did not make a backup of the key and so was ...
