NT 5.0 and EFS -- A victory for widespread use of crypto?

[Steve Dunlop <nospam@bitstream.net>]

All,

Does anyone have any opinions on the encrypting file
system (EFS) that is supposed to ship with NT 5.0?

The white paper on the MSDN web site says it uses
DESX (no explaination as to what the X is) and an
RSA public key algorithm to store the symmetric keys,
which are random for each file.

So what's DESX?

EFS appears to have the architecture to support
arbitrarily long keys although this has been crippled
in the NT5.0 release, presumably because of
export limitations.  It has the key recovery features
you would expect in a commercial product of the
type; they can be turned off administratively.

Is this a victory for wider use of encryption?

--
Steve Dunlop
letters: "dunlop" at "bitstream" dot "net"
http://www2.bitstream.net/~dunlop