What Is Encrypting File System (EFS)?

In the world of computer science, there are two kinds of people: those who love encryption and those who don't. But if you're one of the latter, it's time to reconsider your stance. Encryption is a process by which information is transformed into a form that cannot be easily comprehended by anyone other than its intended recipient(s). It's used daily to protect sensitive information like credit card numbers or passwords—and now Microsoft Windows is bringing this technology to your computer! In order to understand how this works, it's essential to have some background knowledge about how computers store files. When you save a document on your computer, it gets stored as a bunch of 1s and 0s in a folder called "My Documents". This is called plain text because anyone can read it if they want to. But adding encryption makes it much harder for someone else (even if they have access) to be able to read your files without permission. EFS is a sophisticated, standard cryptographic algorithm-based file encryption and decryption functionality found on New Technology File System (NTFS) versions of Microsoft Windows. EFS makes file encryption and decryption transparent. If you think about it, using cryptographic algorithms to keep your data safe is like saying, "I'm going to lock my door with a bunch of keys and hope for the best." It's not precisely foolproof. It's downright stupid. So why do we do it? Because we have no choice. Our manufacturers have programmed our computers with "secure" systems that use cryptography. Use these systems, you must agree to allow them access to your data and because there are so many encryption algorithms out there, we don't have any other choice than to use them for our protection—even though they aren't all that safe in the first place.