Folks, here is a project I am working on. Need your help with it as it is really important. You know we often encrypt files using a key (the DES way -- won't talk about RSA here). Examples are the UN*X "crypt", the MS-Office "Save with password" option, and lots of other ciphers using this alorithm. Take a text file, for instance. You provide a key and the file is encrypted using that key, and can be decrypted only if that key is known. It involved only one key/password. Now I was wondering whether we could somehow fool this encryption system to get to the encrypted material without using the key. It could possibly be done in many ways: * The key has to be stored somewhere in the file, in whatever form, with which the entered key is compared. It could somehow be gotten hold of from there. Perhaps a hex editor could be used to scan the first few bytes of a file for the key. * The decryption algorithm/source could be modified to give access even for a bad password. * During the process that the decryptor asks for the input of the key, we could somehow break out of the routine and bypass it to get to the contents of the file. Do you have any ideas about how this could be done? Or is it even possible theoretically? Any other workarounds you can think of? Au revoir, Wasim Q. Malik