By Serdar Yegulalp
While Windows NT is a far more secure offering than Windows 95
or the 16-bit operating systems, it's only as secure as you make
it. There have been fears of NT security breaches in the past
( Armed & Ready; August 1995), but now there's
a new 16-bit DOS program that can bypass some of NT's safeguards.
The program, named NTFSDOS.EXE, can be used to read drives formatted
with NT's proprietary file system, NTFS. By placing NTFSDOS.EXE
on a DOS boot floppy and booting an NT machine with it, a user
can see password files, security features and administration databases.
(Previously, only NT itself could read NTFS-formatted drives.)
Because NTFSDOS.EXE doesn't work through NT, it ignores user-based
permissions and allows anyone access to every byte on an NTFS
drive. Since NTFS doesn't normally encrypt data, unencrypted text
and data files are directly readable-even with something as simple
as the DOS TYPE command. In other words, anyone can do it.
The program's authors derived NTFSDOS.EXE from a similar program
originally written for Linux, the redistributable version of UNIX.
Both programs were intended as utilities to help legitimate users
access NTFS drives-not as a hacker's tool.
The utility has already been posted on the Internet; it's accessible
via anonymous ftp at ftp://ftp.ora.com/pub/examples/windows/win95.update/ntfsdos.zip.
One easy way to add another level of security to NTFS is to turn
on file compression, although someone may soon write a utility
to decompress NTFS files. A better way is to use an encrypting
disk controller.
Still, any secure installation "relies on the fact that the
hardware itself is secure," said Enzo Schiano, product manager
for Windows NT Server. In other words, keep the server closet
locked.
Copyright ⌐ 1996 CMP Media Inc.