Is it possible to encrypt home folder on Windows 7 and decrypt it after login to Windows?

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This question have been asked[1] but didn't exactly got a direct answer to the question. I want to encrypt my home folder in Windows 7 (c:\users\username) and decrypt it after I log in to Windows. Such feature could be found in Ubuntu and I'm simply looking for an alternative. I do not want to encrypt my whole harddrive, nor want to use TrueCrypt because I want it to be convenient for people using this computer and also protect the user folder.

Any suggestions?

[1]Is it possible to encrypt home folder on windows 7?

nCoM1kWuDFIjxZNd2zoE

Posted 2014-07-22T08:36:41.333

Reputation: 53

Question was closed 2014-07-23T14:52:47.613

Answers

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NTFS/EFS can certainly do that. Go to c:\users, right click on the directory for your username, Properties, General tab, Advanced button. Check Encrypt contents, then OK out. Do of course take the option to encrypt all of the contents.

Anything running under your account will be able to transparently see the contents, just as if it was not encrypted; anything that isn't running under your account, won't. Not excluding "system" accounts. Attempts to read the files from other contexts will not see the encrypted contents; the opens will simply fail.

The encryption uses (as of XP SP1 and later) AES256 with a unique session key for each file. (Information you find on the web suggesting that it uses DES or DES-X is long out of date.) The session key is stored in the file header, encrypted with the public key of an asymmetric key pair from your EFS encryption certificate, which you can only get to if you're logged in as you.

Jamie Hanrahan

Posted 2014-07-22T08:36:41.333

Reputation: 19 777

Of course, you could also keep other users from seeing your files with file permissions, no? – Jamie Hanrahan – 2014-07-22T17:16:29.597

Regarding "transparently see the contents", what if the operation is "get file size". Would it get the file size of the encryption, or would it get the file size of the decrypted contents? – Pacerier – 2015-05-20T09:03:08.613

Encryption doesn't change the size of the file. Are you thinking of NTFS compression? In that case, it depends on which file size you ask for; there are two commonly available (size on disk which is in blocks, and is affected by compression, and number of bytes before EOF, which is in bytes, and not affected by compression). There are several more kept internally. – Jamie Hanrahan – 2015-05-20T15:42:53.603

Asked: 2014-07-22T08:36:41.333

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Active: 2014-07-22T09:15:56.377