On Fri, 04 Jul 2008 09:24:49 -0700, Darren New wrote:

> Jim Henderson wrote:
>> If the built-in encryption keys off the login password only (ie, the
>> login password just unlocks the encryption key), then as an admin, you
>> just have to change the user's password.
> 
> If you change the password without knowing the old password, you can't
> decrypt the private key that encrypts the shared secret.  So, basically,
> you lose access to the encrypted files.

That's good to know - I know this can be implemented a number of 
different ways, and not being a Windows user, I wasn't sure which method 
was used.

>>> Or just zip things up with a password.
>> 
>> That's a pain to use, though
> 
> Plus it's trivially easy to crack. Even long passwords hash down to 8
> characters or something. There are plenty of free programs that'll crack
> a zip archive in a matter of minutes or hours just with brute force.

True also.  I tried a few of those, though, on the zip file of my old 
source code (wouldn't you know, one of my coworkers needed to get at my 
code over the summer - this was in college - and when he couldn't figure 
out the password, he got pissed and nuked the program that had the 
mechanism for generating the password.  The only other copy of the code 
was *in the zip file*, of course, encrypted with the password in 
question).

Jim

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