Security

[Rashkae]

Praising Jesus wrote:
> Well, I am running Windows Vista Ultimate on my machine. I popped in an
> additional hard drive and decided to load Ubuntu on that drive. I
> downloaded the Ultimate Edition 2.0 (sounds like I have a thing for
> Ultimate Editions). In any event, I do a standard install from the disk
> (mild problem here, the install program lets me partition the primary
> drive to use just the free space left on it - or a part of it, but you
> can't do the same thing with a secondary disk. I had to format the whole
> disk or go to manual. There should be an option to use partial space on
> any disk, not just the primary). However, during the install, it wanted
> me to tell it if I wanted to import any of the data from from my Vista
> load to Ubuntu. I said yes. Now, here's the security problem - it let me
> do it. It didn't ask for a username, no password, no administrator
> access - Ubuntu was able to simply download every setting and every file
> on my Windows Vista partition. 
> 
> Shouldn't that have been inaccessible to Ubuntu? I didn't use bitlocker
> or anything, but I thought the files were stored securely and couldn't
> beaccessed except through Windows with a username and password. Is
> everything visible to Ubuntu on a Windows machine?
> 

Yep.

Not just Ubuntu, any Operating system (including another instance of
Windows) that wants to read the files can do so.  That's why something
like bitlocker exists in the first place.

The same thing will happen with your Ubuntu files if you aren't using
encrypted filesystem.  Any OS that can read the file system you store
your files on will have free and open access to those files.