Aug 28, 2007

Microsoft WebDAV Hotfix - KB 933771

Last one for today - this one is really ugly: Microsoft Windows Vista crashes when using encryption with WebDAV. Sometimes I wonder about the quality of test procedures at Microsoft - based on several good articles found on microsoft.com WebDAV is the preferred protocol to work work securely against file servers because it is the only protocol offered by Microsoft which encrypts the communication over the network - in addition to the encrypted EFS files.

But it seems no one cared - copy one small EFS-encrypted file to a WebDAV share says goodby to your Explorer.

Details:

In Windows Vista, the Svchost.exe process stops responding when you try to copy encrypted Encrypting File System (EFS) files to a Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) resource. If you use Windows Explorer to do this, Windows Explorer stops responding. You may have to restart the computer.

Note The Svchost.exe process hosts the WebClient service.

When you try to save an encrypted 2007 Microsoft Office document to a WebDAV resource, you may receive an error message that says that the document cannot be saved.

The KB Article can be found here:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/933771

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Great site I came across while doing research on WebDAV!

I just wanted to chime in on the "no encrypted communication" statement for a moment. As a very recently former MSFT employee covering networking/security technologies, the answer to this would be PKI and IP/sec. WebDAV encryption is (EFS etc.) is proprietary and causes support and interoperability issues. With a proper IPsec implementation many systems (Windows, Linux, Unix) can be made interoperable. And IPsec provides mutual authentication with x.509 for a much higher level of security. So in short the recommendation for your situation would be IPsec. Go to Microsoft.com/networking and look for "Server & Domain Isolation" for reference on securing communication channels.