How do I limit search results by user permissions?

Question

We're running SharePoint Foundation 2010. Many users use the Search Center to find things that exist on a file share, but there is enough sensitive information in some directories of that share that we don't want people without read/write access to those directories to be able to see file names or contents returned in the search results. Ideally we'd solve this by cleaning up and reorganizing the file share, but we want something quick and dirty to make search acceptable while we work on reducing the chaos.

So...How do I restrict, based on a user's permissions (either in the SharePoint site collection or the dfs), the files and directories in a file share that are returned when the user performs a search from the Search Center?

I've been playing around with the Service Application config. It seems like you can limit the scope of crawls and impose scope rules on search results, but it doesn't seem like you can determine which crawl is used by the Search Center or base scope rules on user permissions.

Answer 1

SharePoint uses a "Crawl Account" to read and access the crawled files. This account has to have READ permissions on the content sources. By default, security ACLs are also detected and end users who do not have access to the files will not see them in search results. There is nothing to configure. In SharePoint this would be SharePoint permissions, on a file share it would be the directory permissions applied to the files and folders.

If you are concerned about the content you can:

1. Don't Crawl it
2. Secure it, then crawl it
3. Create a new folder and only crawl that. Adding curated content from the old file share to the new folder and apply security as you go.