By default the Encrypting File System (EFS) uses self signed certificates that are tied to a user account. Should these be lost a user will no longer be able to access their encrypted files. We can configure the EFS recovery agent which can decrypt the certificates of other users, thereby providing access to their encrypted files.
This guide will show you how to manage EFS and BitLocker certificates, including backup and restore. The certificates are important in order for EFS and BitLocker to work correctly, if they are lost then your data may be too. Therefore it is important that we backup these certificates and also know how to restore them.
In this post we’ll determine requirements and scenarios for implementing shielded VMs. In a traditional environment where virtual machines run on a hypervisor host, it’s possible for the administrator of the virtualization layer to get full access to the virtual machines.
For example if you buy a VPS from a provider, you are given access to the guest operating system. It is technically feasible for a malicious or compromised administrator account to gain access to the virtual machine.
This is where shielded VMs in Windows Server 2016 come in to save the day.
Rather than manually configuring Windows Firewall rules individually on each server, we can instead configure firewall rules for multiple profiles using group policy, allowing us to roll them out to a group of computers at once.
In this example we’ll be working with Windows Server 2016, however the steps are very similar in previous versions of the Windows operating system.
This post will show you how to implement policy changes and staging with regards to auditing using Dynamic Access Control (DAC). This allows us to stage and test a central access policy before actually using it in production. This is a useful feature, as implementing DAC can be complex to work with.
Windows Management Framework (WMF) 5.1 contains PowerShell 5.1. By default Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 runs the older PowerShell version 2. By downloading and installing WMF 5.1 to a Windows Server 2008 R2 system, we can upgrade it to PowerShell version 5.1.
In this post I’ll show you how to implement Work Folders with a Windows Server 2016 file server and Windows 10 client. Work Folders allow a user to access their files from an internal file server remotely over the Internet.
What happens if you forget your BitLocker PIN or lose the key? We can implement BitLocker recovery process using self-recovery and recovery password retrieval solutions in Windows Server 2016.
There are a few different methods of recovering BitLocker which we’ll cover here.
The Server Message Block (SMB) protocol is used to provide file and print sharing in a Microsoft based network. To help detect man in the middle (MITM) attacks that may modify SMB traffic in transit, we can configure SMB signing via group policy. By digitally signing SMB packets the client and server can confirm where they originated from as well as their authenticity.
SMB packet signing is available in all supported versions of Windows. Microsoft also note that depending on factors such as the SMB version, file sizes, and specific hardware in use, SMB packet signing can degrade the performance of SMB, which is to be expected as we’re signing every packet that goes across the network, which adds overhead.
In Windows Server 2016 we can secure DNS traffic using DNSSEC and DNS policies. DNSSEC allows a client to validate DNS responses, as by default DNS was not designed to be a secure protocol. DNSSEC allows a client to confirm that the information which has been returned from a DNS server has actually come from the correct and trusted DNS server without modification.
DNSSEC, which stands for Domain Name System Security Extensions, was added to help secure the existing DNS protocol. This guide will walk you through configuring DNSSEC in a Windows Server 2016 environment.