Documents That Are Indexed on Remote Shares Are Returned in Search Results to All Users (280799)

SYMPTOMS

When you use the Indexing Service to index documents that are stored on remote shares, the check for the current users' permissions against the Access Control Lists (ACLs) on the documents is not enforced when searches are performed. Therefore, a search may return documents that the user who performs the search does not have read access to.

In addition, a search results page often displays a small section (called an "abstract") of the document in the result set. In this case, document information is displayed that the user who performs the search does not have permission to read.

CAUSE

When you add a remote path to an Index Server catalog, either by adding a remote virtual root to an indexed Web site or by adding a remote path directly to the Index Server catalog, you must supply a valid user name and password to map to the remote share. The user name and password are used to access the remote resource to index the documents that are stored there.

When a search is performed against an Index Server catalog for documents that are indexed at a remote location, the context of the account that is used to map to the remote location is used to build the results of the search. Therefore, the search results for a remote location include all documents that the mapping account has access to at that location, regardless of the access permissions of the current user who performs the search.

WORKAROUND

To obtain search results that include only documents that the user who performs the search has read access to, perform one of the following workarounds:

Store all documents on the same computer as the Indexing Service.
Use the Search service that comes with Microsoft Site Server 3.0. This indexes the ACLs on NTFS files that are stored remotely and locally.

MORE INFORMATION

The current user context is used for security checks against documents that are indexed locally. The search result set returns only local documents that the user who performs the search has read access to.