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Visual Studio File Encryption Prevention

I was just shocked when I saw that this dialog appears because I thought I was the victim of an encryption virus:

Backup Encryption Key

Using Process Explorer to find out which process opened the dialog, I found efsui.exe and I checked the signature to make sure that this is the official Microsoft product.

Then I thought it over and found the cipher /u command to find the encrypted files on my disk. The result was

 C:\Windows\system32>cipher /u C:\Users\XXX\Documents\Visual Studio 2015\Backup Files\Form1.Designer.vb\~AutoRecover.Form1.Designer.vb.sln: Encryption updated.

and this was confirmed when opening the folder in Explorer.

Encryption in Windows Explorer

I have been using Visual Studio for a long time, but this is the first time I have opened a VB form.

Is it common knowledge that Visual Studio encrypts files? Does this only happen for VB or is it due to some other VS update that has been reinstalled? How to disable this feature?

I tried:

  • type "encrypt" and "encrypt" in the Visual Studio quick search box.
  • find an answer like this about removable drives , but my C: drive is not deleted.
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I suspect this is a function that project templates / extensions can use:

From: http://www.visualmicro.com/forums/YaBB.pl?num=1362001590/0

In general, a number of frauds in Win32 code caused .sln recovery files that were not encrypted. Creating an independent arduino project created an encrypted .sln recovery file in a minute or so

In this case, the Arduino template seems to have this special flag (perhaps because it can store credentials (App Store IDs, private keys, etc.)).

In my mind, this is a great sign that the developers of Microsoft Visual Studio thought about the possibility of leakage of confidential information into "temporary" files, which can even be moved through a domain controller and profile replication.

Thus, it seems that there is no way to disable this function (and this is correct). But you can always store your projects / application data in a file system that does not support NTFS encryption. As the name suggests, it will probably be any other file system.

¹ It is possible that any POSIX file systems that support extended attributes may also support this feature in Windows, but I have not heard about this before

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