Password protect

[bblqj78]

evening all...

is there any applications out there that allow you to password protect files and folders on your hard drive???

Cheers

[Sterling_Aug]

Yes, it is called Win2K and WinXP.

[bblqj78]

you mean that you can do this on Windows XP...built in?

[Midknyte]

the point of security in win2k and xp is so that you don't have to remember multiple passwords. you set up permissions on each file/folder by user and/or group. when the user logs in, they only have access to what you give them permission to.

[Johnny Fist]

Yeah, kind of what you've been able to do in Linux for years.

[bblqj78]

This would be OK if I had setup multiple logins for my system…but I don’t want that. All I want to do is password protect a few folders. I tried FolderLock…but it seems a bit screwed up. Any other applications?

[Sterling_Aug]

Check the help file under encription.

You can password protect any file or folder under Windows.

[G]

An extract for a password retrieval program I wrote about for a web page for a major encryption breaking and password retrieval software developer.


Zip and RAR files are typically "archives" (a file that contain other files). Generally, the files in an archive are compressed - reducing the original archives content files. However, archiving compression is more effective for RAR than for the Zip format. Archiving makes it easy to group, transport, and copy files faster. For this reason, even though the Zip format is universally used and accepted as a de facto standard RAR is still an alternative archiving favourite for many users. There are many Zip and RAR archiving programs; the most widely used are WinZip and WinRAR, respectively.

Many of the attractive advances that RAR has over Zip have now been addressed with WinZip V9+. Nevertheless, RAR has an important part to play in the archiving fraternity. The RAR format has a significantly improved compression engine compared to the one used for the Zip format, especially in solid mode. Another important feature of RAR is its support for multi-volume archives. A solid archive, for example, is a RAR archive packed by a special compression method, which treats all files, within the archive, as one continuous data stream. Solid archives are supported only by the RAR archiving format. ZIP archives are always non-solid. The archiving method for RAR archives is a user selectable option and may be solid or non-solid, but solid archiving significantly increases compression, especially when adding a large number of small, similar files. However, there are some disadvantages to using RAR solid archiving (see WinRAR’s Help File for further details).

Many users who archive material frequently use both WinRAR for the RAR format advantages and WinZip for the Zip format advantages.

WinZip V9 and WinRAR V3.41 both use AES encryption.

Encryption gives you a way of protecting your sensitive documents etc contained in a .zip or .rar archive.

The cipher uses the cryptographic hash function HMAC-SHA (Secure Hash Algorithm)-1, producing a 160-bit hash value (a standard recently) from an arbitrary length string as a result, mixing the outputs in a complicated way, to produce a 128- or 256-bit encryption key. Note: 128-bit and 256-bit numbers refer to the size of the encryption keys that are used to encrypt the data.

For both formats, the security of your data depends not only on the strength of the encryption method but also on the strength of your password e.g., length and composition of the password(s). In general, longer passwords are more secure than shorter ones. In fact, taking full advantage of the full strength of AES (a block cipher with 128-bit block size and 128- or 256-bit keys) encryption requires a password approximately 32 characters for 128-bit encryption and 64 characters for 256-bit encryption. Passwords that contain a mixture of letters (upper and lower case), digits, punctuation, spaces and symbols requires a “brute-force” retrieval approach using all printable characters – an extremely CPU intensive, time consuming process. Please note that unlike WinRAR encrypted archives, WinZip’s encryption archives apply to the contents of files stored within an archive only. Information about an encrypted file, e.g., name, date, size, attributes, and compression ratio, are stored in an unencrypted form in the Zip file's directory and can be viewed, without a password, by anyone who has access to the Zip file.

However, WinZip protected files can also use AES 256-bit encryption (not included in WinRAR at this time) that has the highest probability of success against password retrieval programs. This also means that valuable data will be lost indefinitely if the password is forgotten etc.