[WinPartners] Password protect a folder

[Kerem B Limon]

I would do a search on download.com (C|NET) for 'password' and 'lock' to 
see what's out there.

However, what makes me wonder is what exactly you (or your boss) are trying 
to do--it's not immediately clear from your description. That is, I 
understand how you want it to work, but why you want it to work that way, 
or your real reason might be helpful to know to suggest better solutions.

I ask this because, the proper way to do access control on files without 
encryption is exactly what you say you don't want to do, which is user and 
file access control lists (ACLs). Theoretically, you could create a dummy 
user, set the file/folder permissions to read/write by only that user, and 
then use Run As... commands to "open" the file using a different identity 
(that of the dummy user) which would prompt you for a password. Note that 
this all means nothing if someone has physical access to the machine and 
can boot it from alternate media and/or remove the drives.

If it is content security you are concerned about, you should then encrypt 
files, perhaps using PGP or using the built-in EFS (Encrypting/ed File 
System). This uses certificates combined with a password to unlock the 
files transparently once the user's authenticated. One word of 
caution--unless you are otherwise sure, always create a recovery agent 
(e.g. a recovery identity who can also access the encrypted content) that 
can unlock the files and decrypt if the owner forgets their password or 
loses their certificates.

Kerem

At 04/07/06 14:14  Tuesday, Read Schusky wrote:
>My boss would like to be able to password protect a folder in Windows XP. 
>Does anyone have a suggested program for that, or seen a review of such 
>programs? Ideally the folder and it's contained files would still show up 
>in Windows Explorer or when she goes to open a file (i.e., I don't want 
>anything "hidden"), but a dialog asking for a password would come up when 
>someone tries to open anything in that folder, and she'd be able to save 
>or move/copy anything to that folder and have it immediately protected 
>(i.e., compressing the folder & passwording it isn't a good solution). 
>This doesn't need to be heavy duty (e.g., encrypting the files isn't 
>necessary), and once it's set up it needs to be pretty transparent except 
>for requiring the password. Setting up multiple users in Windows itself is 
>not the way I'd like to go.
>
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