EFS Design for Irresponsible Admins
If you have read some of my other blog posts then you know I have some design philosophies that I abide by. Let me introduce to you a new one. Irresponsibility. If your design takes into account the manual actions of people, then failure is imminent, and failure is further exacerbated by admin turnover. This leads me to my story. How do I protect user data from workstation admins tasked with supporting workstations? No this is not a rhetorical question. The design takes into account drive-by admins, i.e. connect as local admin and steal the data. I'm not really sure how many of these admins exist, however someone in the IT security department is adamant they are plentiful, and made it clear they must be stopped. So the usual EFS mantra is that a CA/SubCA should be used for the EFS/Recovery Agent certificates. I wholeheartedly agree, but in many IT shops this is a lot of complexity and headache. In addition to the complexity there is the problem of remembering to renew the data ...