Thats effortless hacking, pal!

Sep 25, 2012 by DamonDerga786

Yesterday I was talking about secrets hiding and cryptography. A buddy of mine said he was in a position to crack any Word document in a single day as a maximum. He stated it was not a dilemma of password complexity: he knew how to strip Word protection away. As a proof, he took an old Word document and he was truly able to crack it in a handful of minutes.

I said he was only lucky and that I was ready to bet a non trivial sum of cash that he would not be in a position to crack a Word document encrypted by me. He laughed out loud, he stated I just wanted to shed cash… but he did not accept my bet.

Then I sent the Word document encrypted by me to him anyway: he is still trying to crack it (a week is currently passed… but I feel the encryption will stand against his attacks for ten/fifteen years).

I told you this little story as a metaphor of how issues genuinely go when talking about encryption: it is virtually usually a matter of process, and not tools.

Word has an superb encryption system, although it is limited by US key length limitation: if you just know how to do it, you can super-encrypt a Word document, and be confident that no-a single (except, probably, CIA) will succeed in cracking it. The issue is that it is not straightforward to encrypt a Word document properly: you ought to know a thing or two before undertaking it. Just pressing “Shield this document with a password” does not perform (and tends to make people like my buddy boast himself!)

The story has morale: market place lack of tools that make severe encryption very easily. Thats one particular of encryption software home missions: to make easy to use, but critical encryption tools (such as Folder Crypt).

Secondarily, that it is typically heard of people cracking applications, software program barriers, ciphered documents and this makes the casual Net user think that no true security is attainable on Web. Yet again, this happens because encryption processes and policies are frequently weak, when not at all bugged.

On the contrary, data encrypted following secure processes and making use of encryption standard tools stay secret.

Oh, by the way: to safely encrypt a Word document just adhere to these actions:

1. Start off Word.

two. Select File | Save as.

three. Choose the Tools extended menu alternative.

4. Pick Security Alternatives from the drop-down list.

five. Click the Advanced button.

6. From the Encryption Type dialog, copy the name of the encryption sort name and encryption algorithm from the Pick an encryption variety list.

7. RC4, Microsoft enhanced RSA and AES Cryptographic provider

8. Set maximum essential length to 128

For more, please go to: secure email