AplusWebMaster
Topic Starter
FYI…
- http://www.securityfocus.com/brief/407
2007-01-15 ~ "Office workers looking to protect their documents may want to select a higher grade of encryption. Swiss information-technology firm Objectif Sécurité announced last week that its latest pre-generated list of passwords and their hashes, known as a rainbow table, can now crack the standard encryption on Word and Excel documents in about 5 minutes on average. Using about 4 gigabytes of data, the program–named Ophcrack_office–can quickly defeat almost 99.6 percent of all passwords, according to the company. "What happens is that we actually crack the 40-bit key that is used to encrypt Word and Excel documents," Philippe Oechslin, CEO of Swiss information-technology firm Objectif Sécurité and the inventor of rainbow tables, told SecurityFocus in an e-mail. "We found a way to use the same tables for both Word and Excel, although they have different file formats." Rainbow tables sidestep the difficulty in cracking a single password by instead creating a large data set of hashes from nearly every possible password. To break a password, the attacker merely looks up the hash to find the password that produces that code…"
- http://www.securityfocus.com/brief/407
2007-01-15 ~ "Office workers looking to protect their documents may want to select a higher grade of encryption. Swiss information-technology firm Objectif Sécurité announced last week that its latest pre-generated list of passwords and their hashes, known as a rainbow table, can now crack the standard encryption on Word and Excel documents in about 5 minutes on average. Using about 4 gigabytes of data, the program–named Ophcrack_office–can quickly defeat almost 99.6 percent of all passwords, according to the company. "What happens is that we actually crack the 40-bit key that is used to encrypt Word and Excel documents," Philippe Oechslin, CEO of Swiss information-technology firm Objectif Sécurité and the inventor of rainbow tables, told SecurityFocus in an e-mail. "We found a way to use the same tables for both Word and Excel, although they have different file formats." Rainbow tables sidestep the difficulty in cracking a single password by instead creating a large data set of hashes from nearly every possible password. To break a password, the attacker merely looks up the hash to find the password that produces that code…"