Re: [TriLUG] OT: password cracking service for Word docs

[Greg Brown]

I just tried a few things with Office 2003 with no success.  First I  
created a document then protected it with two passwords (one for  
reading and one for editing).  I tried the strings approach, but that  
didn't work.  So I tried to pummel the whole document through od, then  
take the output from od, extract anything that matched /^[A-Za-z]+$/  
and print the character stuff to a tmp file (I realize this would  
delete numbers in the passwords, but I was just looking to see if I  
could get partial string matches).  I then tried to extract pieces of  
the password through character searching of the od output file with no  
real luck.  So, whatever M$ is doing it appears they are finally using  
some kind of crypt() like function instead of storing plaintext  
passwords (wow, what a concept).  All that said, it did appear that  
portions of the text in the document were readable using this approach.  
 I have to get to the airport or I'd spend more time on this, but I've  
got to run... er fly.

Greg

On Friday, Mar 26, 2004, at 22:37 US/Eastern, Jon Carnes wrote:

Hmmm, the password used to be stored in plain text near the end of the
document - you could grab it with a hex editor or probably even using
strings.
I do hope that later versions of Word are more advanced than this... I
mean, it's supposed to be DOD ready!
Jon Carnes

On Fri, 2004-03-26 at 21:17, Chris Knowles wrote:
OK, I tried it with word, and it no worky.  OO pops up and says that  
it
can't open protected documents.  Now, it will work if all they've done
is protect against changes, but not if they've protected the entire
document.

CJK

On Fri, 2004-03-26 at 17:05, Jason Tower wrote:
i can't speak for word, but a client recently sent me a XLS file  
that had
passwd-protected cells/columns (they had forgotten the passwd and  
wanted
to know if i could "fix" it).  OO calc had no trouble with it, saved  
it as
a new file and all was right with the world.  i did have to do a
"unprotect sheet" or something like that first, only took a second.

jason

On Fri, 2004-03-26 at 16:39, Dan wrote:
--On Friday, March 26, 2004 04:07:41 PM -0500 Jason Tower
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
yeah, it's called openoffice :)
'splain please... will OpenOffice read in the password protected  
files?
I've not played with OO because, like Office, it seems to be way  
bloated
to
me.
OpenOffice will not read password protected word documents at all.
Do give it a try for your general office needs, though, it feels a  
lot
less bloated in recent versions, like the one included in Fedora  
Core 1
or Mandrake 10.

AbiWord will open some types of password-protected Word docs... but  
it
will prompt for the password.  It needs this to decrypt.

I believe John Beimler has experience with this; if he doesn't see  
this
thread, you may want to ask him on IRC (nick jbeimler).

--Jeremy

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