Unable to secure personal profile from work sys admin

[Guest]

I use my laptop for home and work. One user is HOME; the other WORK. As the
owner and admin of the laptop, I set my WORK account so that it cannot access
the HOME info, to protect my personal info while at work.

When I log into our work domain, the security policy installs an admin
account that gives our sysadmin FULL access to my system. Is there no way to
secure the info in my HOME profile?

Thanks,
Rob

 

[Steven L Umbach]

The best possible solution would be to encrypt the contents of folders that
have sensitive info but NOT your whole user profile. However a determined
administrator could make himself a Recovery Agent for EFS [available in XP
Pro] for the domain in order to access your data if he really wanted to and
you can see what users can access EFS encrypted files in the properties of
the EFS files. While EFS is built and convenient because of that you may
want to consider a third party encryption alternative if you think such a
risk could exist. No matter what type of encryption you would consider they
all have the danger that the user can lose permanent access to encrypted
data if he decryption keys are lost or corrupted so you would want to take
extra precautions, including backing up the PRIVATE key, to minimize such
based on the recommendations of the publisher of the application. If you do
use encryption you may also want to keep clear text backups of important
files stored safely at home just in case a problem arises. Also a user that
has the proper NTFS permissions to encrypted files may not be able to read
them but could delete them. The links below may help. --- Steve

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/deploy/cryptfs.mspx ---
EFS in XP Pro
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;223316 --- EFS
best practices
http://www.snapfiles.com/Freeware/security/fwencrypt.html --- free file
encryption tools
http://www.snapfiles.com/Shareware/security/swencrypt.html --- shareware
file encryption tools