Elcomsoft updates password breaker s/w

MOSCOW, RUSSIA: ElcomSoft Co.Ltd. updates Advanced Office Password Breaker, a product to remove password protection from Microsoft Office documents, adding Rainbow Tables for password-protected Excel spreadsheets.

Rainbow Tables offer near-instant recovery of 97 percent of spreadsheets protected with 40-bit encryption used by Microsoft Excel 97-2000 and in documents saved by later versions of the product in compatibility mode.

According to the release, with updated Rainbow Tables, users of Advanced Office Password Breaker will enjoy the ability to unlock most Excel spreadsheets in just minutes instead of days.

"We are one step closer to making 40-bit encryption completely obsolete," says ElcomSoft CEO Vladimir Katalov.

"Employing Rainbow Tables to unlock Microsoft Excel spreadsheets advances our products yet another step," he adds.

The company is now able to recover all Microsoft Word documents and the majority of Microsoft Excel spreadsheets protected with 40-bit encryption in a few minutes instead of days without performing a brute force attack, release added.

How Rainbow Tables works?

Advanced Office Password Breaker uses the most advanced cryptographic algorithms to provide as fast recovery of password-protected Office documents as possible.

Rainbow Tables are particularly effective in speeding up password recovery, as they use pre-computed hash tables that allow unlocking to 97 percent of documents protected with 40-bit encryption keys in just minutes instead of days or weeks.

According to Katalov, a 100 percent chance of recovery provided by Thunder Tables for Microsoft Word documents is not possible for Microsoft Excel spreadsheets even theoretically due to the differences between the two formats. However, should a particular Excel spreadsheet fall into the 3 percent category, Advanced Office Password Breaker will still unlock the protected document (typically, in 48 hours or less) with brute force attack on the encryption key.