
Encrypting File System Technical Reference.Note EFS is not fully supported on Windows 7 Starter, Home Basic, and Home Premium editions. Even if someone else were able to change the permission and see the files, he/she couldn't open them anyway.

If you don't want the folder content to visible at all, you need to change the Access Control List (ACL) permissions from the Security tab of the folder properties.

The EFS component driver treats this encryption attribute in a way that is analogous to the inheritance of file permissions in NTFS: if a folder is marked for encryption, then by default all files and subfolders that are created under the folder are also encrypted. Quoting Wikipedia:įolders whose contents are to be encrypted by the file system are marked with an encryption attribute. Windows does not really encrypt folders: when you enable the encryption option, all you're doing is forcing new files created inside to be automatically encrypted.

Source: Encrypting File System Folder encryption The technology enables files to be transparently encrypted to protect confidential data from attackers with physical access to the computer. The Encrypting File System (EFS) on Microsoft Windows is a feature introduced in version 3.0 of NTFS that provides filesystem-level encryption.
