14 DAY TRIAL // Moscow-based company ElcomSoft recently released two brand new password recovery tools featuring Office 2013 support, which represents the first successful attempt to break into the new Office encryption system.
Elcomsoft Advanced Office Password Recovery and Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery can now recover plain-text passwords used to encrypt Microsoft Office 2013 documents, the company announced in a press statement.
“Initially, we are releasing a CPU-only implementation, with support for additional hardware accelerators such as ATI and NVIDIA video cards scheduled for a later date,” the statement reads.
Wondering how’s this possible since Microsoft hasn’t yet released the full version of the new Office?
Elcomsoft says it didn’t use brute force attacks because Microsoft has developed special protection systems in this regard, but instead it developed a special method relying on dictionary attacks, masks and advanced permutations.
“In version 2013, Microsoft used an even tighter encryption compared to the already strong Office 2010. To further strengthen the protection, Microsoft replaced SHA1 algorithm used for calculating hash values with a stronger and slower SHA512. In addition, the encryption key is now 256 bits long, while the previous versions of Microsoft Office were using ‘only’ 128 bit,” Andrey Malyshev of Elcomsoft said.
Microsoft will release the new Office 2013 later this year or in early 2013 and the product will initially be available in two different versions, namely Office 365 Home Premium and Office 365 Small Business Premium.
A subscription service will allow buyers to use the same license on up to 5 different devices, with pricing to start at $99.99 / €76.30 for the Home Premium version. This particular license will bring all Office applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Access and Publisher), as well as PC and Mac compatibility.