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Quick Encryption from the Windows XP Context Menu

By Mohammad Yousef | July 2005

There’s no doubt that computers and the internet have become a vital part of our lives. Although this has huge benefits, we can’t overlook downsides such as the vulnerability of data. It only takes seconds for sensitive information to get to the hands of the wrong person. To prevent this from happening, you can take certain security measures, one of which is encryption.

Encryption can be done using different software, but if you have Windows XP Pro and NTFS as your file system, you won’t need any additional software. To do this go to a file or folder’s properties and click Advanced. You’ll see an option that says “Encrypt contents to secure data”. This method works perfectly; however, if you use encryption very often, you might find it too many clicks away. I’ll show you a registry hack which will place the encryption option in the context menu for better accessibility.

Before I start, I must warn you that the registry is a crucial part of your system and messing around with it is dangerous. Although it can’t set off some nuclear reaction, improper use of the registry can severely damage your system. So, I only recommend registry hacks if you’re familiar with the registry or at least able to follow my instructions carefully.

1. Open Registry Editor: Click start | Click Run… | Type regedit | Press Enter

2. Navigate to the following key (if it doesn’t exist, create it): HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\ CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced

3. Look for a DWORD value called EncryptionContextMenu (if it doesn’t exist, create it).

4. Change its value data to 1.

5. Click OK and close the Registry Editor.

Now if you right-click a file or folder, you should see “Encrypt” in the list. If, for some reason, you decide to remove “Encrypt” from the context menu, go back to the registry and change the value data of EncryptionContextMenu to 0.