ANY-maze Help > The ANY-maze reference > The Options page > Managing users in ANY-maze > Securing your ANY-maze system and data

Securing your ANY-maze system and data

This topic describes methods of securing ANY-maze using its own user accounts, and other security features. If you have chosen to use Windows user accounts, then you should also refer to the Windows documentation for details of how to secure your system.

Overview

ANY-maze is not intended to be a highly secure system, but it does include some security features that are intended to protect your ANY-maze settings and data from casual interference. For example, it's easy to protect an experiment file using a password, which will prevent another user from opening the file and altering something - either accidentally or intentionally.

However, if you have critical security concerns, such as the threat of commercial espionage, then the security features of ANY-maze won't provide sufficient protection and you should seek a more robust solution.

Limiting access to ANY-maze

Limiting access to ANY-maze is a simple and effective first line of defence against either inadvertent or malicious attempts to access your data.

ANY-maze includes its own system for managing users, and you can use this to limit access to a select group of individuals. If your concern is to secure the system, then you should ensure that the user policies are set so that new users CAN'T create their own accounts, and that passwords ARE required.

Note that ANY-maze user accounts are casually secure - a specialist could probably crack them with minimal effort.

You'll find more information in the following topics:

Securing per-user settings

Securing a user's settings (such as those entered on the Options page) is not really a necessary action, as settings are unlikely to be confidential. Nevertheless, protecting settings can still be a good idea as it can help avoid frustration and confusion when one user either accidentally or mischievously alters another's settings.

To secure users' settings, you should ensure that the user policies are set so that passwords ARE required.

You'll find more information in the following topics:

Protecting experiment and protocol files

Protecting ANY-maze experiment and protocol files is often highly desirable even if the files don't contain highly confidential data - if you've ever found yourself wondering how something was deleted from a document you were writing, or how your spreadsheet suddenly no longer works, then you'll know what I mean!

Files in ANY-maze can be protected using a password - this can be the same as your user password, or different - it's up to you. When you save a file, you supply the password you want to use - then whenever you open the file, you will need to enter the password before you can access it.

In fact, ANY-maze also encrypts password-protected files so they can't be read using any other software either. In this respect, the files really are quite secure (although they probably wouldn't pose much of a challenge to a true expert).

By the way, if you think you'll usually want to secure your files, then you can set ANY-maze to automatically protect them using your ANY-maze user password. This has the added benefit that ANY-maze won't require you to enter your password each time you open a protected file, provided you're logged on under your own user account (and you haven't changed your user password since you saved the file).

You'll find more information in the following topics:

Other security options

Although the above features provide a reasonable level of casual security for your ANY-maze system and files, they are by no means a complete solution. For example, while ANY-maze can protect your files so other users can't open them, it can't prevent someone else from moving, copying or deleting them.

You can improve security by using the Windows operating system's native capabilities to protect access to individual drives and folders. If you decide to do this, then you will want to set up individual Windows user accounts for all your ANY-maze users, in which case you should probably also change ANY-maze so it uses Windows users rather than managing its own user accounts.

You'll find more information in the following topics:

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ANY-maze help topic T0948