Protecting documents against modification is kind of a joke... if you can read the data (i.e. it's not encrypted or you know the encryption key), you can change it. It's just a protection mechanism only enforcable in software you use to read it.
In my grad school crypto class, we cracked the Excel hashes used to enforce this exact type of protection (though I don't know if it is the same for .doc files). I reversed the weak hash using pen and paper, so not only is the protection pointless since you can just remove the hash from the file header, but you can also figure out the password used to protect the document. Anyway, I thought there was a way to remove this kind of modification protection in documents through open office. Maybe somewhere in the security preferences or something. The harder stuff to get around is the read-protection encryption (though it's also somewhat weak), but this should be easy to disable in theory and hopefully practice as well. If you easily remove it without knowing the hash, there should be a number of .doc file password crackers out there you could use. Good luck, tim _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
