Encryption by EFS

Question

I have the Tor folder in Desktop of Windows 10.

If I created another folder, encrypt it by EFS and put the Tor folder inside of it, do I gain any advantage for security?

I suppose temporary files are still written to Windows TMP folder, but I wanted to ask.

Also does using Tor in EFS folder create any performance penalty?

Answer 1

If you create an encrypted folder and put Tor Browser inside of it:

• Remote - You will gain no security advantage against a remote attacker: exploits will still work fine.
• Local Offline - You will gain some advantage against an offline local attacker if the encrypted folder isn't mounted/decrypted: they would have issues meaningfully tampering with the Tor Browser files in the folder.
  • However, memory pages and other artifacts will remain and be visible outside of the encrypted container unless you've taken extra steps to avoid them being created by the operating system.
• Local Online - You would gain no advantage against an online local attacker, if they got access to your logged in session (through any means) they would have full access to the files.
• Performance - You would have a small performance penalty. Tor Browser tries to stop the application itself writing back to disk, so the main overhead would be the initial loading of Tor Browser into memory. Disk encryption uses symmetric cryptography which modern computers can do efficiently and at high speeds. The performance impact would likely not be noticable.