At 3:49 PM 9/23/95, steven ryan wrote:
They searched for an applications programmer *UN*skilled at cryptography to try and crack the password protection of the 8 best selling Mac programs. Quicken 5.0 was cracked in 5 minutes. Adobe Acrobat in 2 hours.
Yup, pretty amazing. I only skimmed the article, but I believe that out of all the programs he tried, there was only one whose crypto he couldn't crack. I found it all a little hard to believe. I mean, even if they used the most obsolete algorithm, wouldn't you have to know _something_ about cryptanalysis to crack it? Are these vendors just putting a "this file is locked with this such and such a password" string at the front of the file, or what? Interesting historical note: In my old APL days (early 80's), IBM used to lock their VSAPL workspaces with just such a scheme--a "locked bit" at some fixed position in the file. But there were enough other reasons not to use that horrible product... --Dave. -- Dave Mandl dmandl@panix.com http://wfmu.org/~davem