Frequently Asked Question: Advanced Office Password RECOVERY or Advanced Office Password BREAKER?

May 20th, 2009 by Olga Koksharova
Category: «General», «Software», «Tips & Tricks»

Time is money, difficult to contradict this fact. And another proven fact is that you lose something exactly when something turns out to be absolutely necessary. Once you lost a password to your Word document or presentation that you were going to give in an hour, or Excel report which was supposed to be sent to your manager yesterday… you will count seconds before you get back your files.

And so, the crucial difference between Advanced Office Password Recovery (AOPR) and Advanced Office Password Breaker (AOPB) lies in TIME needed for getting your data back.

The two programs have opposite approaches for decrypting the document contents. So, how do they work? Microsoft Office converts each password to its own encryption key. And so we can either search for the correct password itself or find the document encryption key. Accordingly, AOPR tries all possible passwords (using brute force/mask/dictionary attacks) to find the right one, whereas AOPB takes the document encryption key that you can use to decrypt the document and get your data back.

Since ElcomSoft developed special technology that uses precomputed tables for Word and Excel (Thunder Tables ™) with 40-bit encryption keys, it takes seconds to find Word and Excel encryption keys.

Find program differences reflected in the table:

Advanced Office Password Recovery Advanced Office Password Breaker
• works with all MS Office components (Word, Excel, Outlook, OneNote, Project, Visio etc)
• supports all versions (from ancient 2.0 for DOS to Office 2007)
• finds all kinds of passwords (to open, save, document/sheet protection, VBA etc)
• uses brute-force, mask and dictionary attacks
• does not guarantee finding long and complex password in real/reasonable time
• works with MS Word and Excel documents only
• supports Office 97/2000, as well as Office XP/2003 with default/compatible 40-bit encryption
• deals with file-open-passwords only
• uses encryption key attack
guaranteed key search and document decryption
instant key recovery using precomputed tables (Enterprise version only) with 100% probability for Word documents and 97% for Excel files

You see, it’s all about time. If you have time, you can use AOPR to recover lost password. If you have no time, use AOPB and attack the encryption key and decrypt your document instantly.