Thursday, November 29, 2012

EFS Recovery

There are 2 types of recovery for Encrypting File System (EFS): Key Recovery and Data Recovery. When there is a designated Key Recovery Agent (KRA) on a CA server, the KRA is authorized to retrieve the user's certificate and private key from the CA database. The user would then be able to use the recovered key to decrypt EFS files. The "Archive subject's encryption private key" in the template "Request Handling" tab should be enabled for archival. In addition, CA server must be prepared for key archival before any rollout, as the key archival should be encrypted by KRA key. As the KRA can retrieve any archived keys, there should be at least 2 different persons to be the CA administrator and the KRA separately. See "Understanding User Key Recovery".

Extract:
The recovery of a private key is a manual process that requires the user(s) to contact an administrative authority to perform the necessary processes. It should be a best practice of any organization to separate the roles of CA Officer and KRA as a minimum of two physical persons.

On the other hand, the Data Recovery Agent (DRA) is authorized the recover and decrypt all encrypted files. The DRA must be enrolled and added to the AD Group Policy to allow DRA to decrypt files.  Furthermore, DRA can be updated subsequently using Group Policy if there are any changes.

For further comparison (pros and cons) and the details on both recovery methods, refer to "Key Recovery vs Data Recovery Differences".

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