That Depends on Your Definition of Secure

Well, it's all true. NTFSDOS can read NTFS partitions when you bootthe system from DOS. And NTFSDOS makes them appear exactly as if they were FATdrives, no matter how many files are on them.

However, the situation is not as bad as you think. There are holes in theholes that Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell have tried to fill, or drivethrough, or whatever their intentions are.

For NTFSDOS to work, you must physically access the system because thenetwork redirector in Windows for Workgroups and Win95 already let youaccess network shares of NTFS volumes. If you can boot from a floppy (on Intelsystems only) or install the utility on the hard drive of a Windows-drivensystem, you can execute NTFSDOS. It stays in memory until shutdown, granting youread-only access to NTFS-formatted disks or partitions on the local system.

You can protect yourself by exploiting what NTFSDOS doesn't do: Version 1.1doesn't read a partition larger than 2GB because DOS can't read past thatboundary (a new NTFSDOS version will read >2GB). NTFSDOS doesn't read stripeddisks, so anything with RAID is inaccessible. And NTFSDOS doesn't write to anNTFS partition, but a planned version will. So, if you have extra money for somelarger hard drives, build up your system so that DOS can't run on it. Or if youare dual-booting, make your NT stuff big enough to act as a firewall.

Other concerns (geez, I hope I'm not giving anyone ideas) are remote servermanagement utilities and hardware: Watch out with server add-in boards that letyou remotely manage a server, down to the hardware level, even if you're bootingfrom a floppy thousands of miles away from the server. This capability can bedangerous if, say, disgruntled employees get your server's phone number and havethe system management utility. They can boot from a floppy locally and read allyour NTFS files. If you use hardware (power on) passwords, this scenario isn't aproblem.

You can protect yourself by emulating secure data warehouses: Implementphysical security on server systems by limiting access to the boxes and disablefloppy drives, turn on hardware passwords on workstations, disable automaticlogons and shutdown features, and so forth. You can't hold NT responsible forNTFS security if NT isn't running as Microsoft says ("Windows NT FileSystem: Built for Data Security," Microsoft, 1996).

What can you legitimately use NTFSDOS for? Perhaps you can back up an NTFSvolume from Windows 3.x. But if you have an NTFS volume, you are running NT, sowhy not use an NT-native backup utility? Or you can try to read an NTFS volumeon a crashed NT system to see whether your files are still there. Just be awarethat if you are using NTFSDOS legitimately and not hacking someone else's box,you must be careful. NTFSDOS can corrupt the data you pull from an NTFS volume,and the makers obviously offer no guarantees about maintaining data integrity.