From: Caolan McNamara (Caolan.McNamara at domain ul.ie)
Date: Wed 14 Apr 1999 - 18:02:17 IST
On 12-Apr-99 Caolan McNamara wrote:
>Currently i am interested in decrypting ms documents. Im
>not trying to crack the password. If i have a password
>im trying to find out what is the mechanism to decrypt
>the word document. Anyone have any pointers ?
>
>Word {8|97} is the particular format im talking about.
>
>>From some serious web searching i believe that the
>encryption algorithm is rc4, of course i dont know
>jack about that though. Was there someone from
>baltimore on this list :-) ?
>
>more details, samples etc at
>http://www.csn.ul.ie/~caolan/challenge/decryption.README
latest update.
From: Fauzan Mirza <fauzan at domain dcs.rhbnc.ac.uk>
(ed note: this mirza character is a bit of an encryption head)
>From what I've gathered, Word 97 uses the RC4 stream cipher and a modified
>MD5 hash (I don't know how the hash is modified though). I also know that
>there is a slow key processing stage where the MD5 is iterated a number of
>times (I've forgotten the exact number of times). This alone would imply
>that working out the exact decryption method merely by examining
>ciphertexts would be infeasible. As I said, the easiest thing would be to
>get the details from Microsoft (however, I doubt they'd do this willingly)
>or have Word 97 reverse engineered.
all of this is seconded by and added to by
http://www.crak.com/
looks more and more like this decryption lark is a non runner, *sigh*.
i wonder about some reverse engineering on word to see if anything can
be squeezed out of it :-). anyone have an email address for a microsoft
employee working on word ?
C.
Real Life: Caolan McNamara * Doing: MSc in HCI
Work: Caolan.McNamara at domain ul.ie * Phone: +353-61-202699
URL: http://www.csn.ul.ie/~caolan * Sig: an oblique strategy
Simple subtraction
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