Archive for the ‘Software’ Category

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Monday, June 21st, 2010

It’s been two weeks since Steve Jobs has announced release of new iPhone 4 and iOS 4 operating system during his keynote on WWDC’2010. New iPhone will begin shipping on Thursday, 24th of June, and new iOS will become available for download today, just few hours are left.

iOS 4 comes packed with a lot of nice features (long-awaited multitasking, background location services, iBooks and much improved Mail app  just to name a few) and we are very pleased to announce today the release of the new version of Elcomsoft iPhone Password Breaker with support for iTunes 9.2 and iOS 4.

Elcomsoft iPhone Password Breaker (or EPPB for short) is a utility to recover passwords for encrypted and password-protected iPhone/iPod/iPad backups created with iTunes (please note that it’s not meant to recover or remove passcode lock on the device).

With iOS 4 Apple has completely changed the way backups are encrypted and stored. Backup and restore processes are way much faster now. Apple have also improved protection against password recovery attacks, thus making our job harder (password recovery is about 5x slower for new backups than for older ones).

We at Elcomsoft try our best to keep up with the times, so most of our tools & programs are adjusted to the latest technologically advanced features. The EPPB is not an exception, new version of EPPB fully supports both old and new backup formats. It also supports hardware acceleration using NVIDIA and ATI GPUs and Tableau TACC1441.

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Posted in Elcom-News, General, Software | No Comments »

‘Casual and Secure’ Friday Post

Friday, May 14th, 2010

German law has always been strict about any possible security breaches. This week German court ordered that anyone using wireless networks should protect them with a password so the third party could not download data illegally.  

However, there is no order that users have to change their Wi-Fi passwords regularly, the only requirement being to set up a password on the initial stage of wireless access installation and configuration.

I’ve conducted a mini-research here in Russia. There are 5 wireless networks in range that my computer finds when at home. Although all of the networks have rather bizarre names, they are all WPA- or WPA2-protected. My guess is that people do not install wireless access at home by themselves or browse the Internet for instructions and find some on protection and passwords. At the same time, I often come across unprotected networks in Moscow and I do use them to check my Twitter account. It is obvious that to make any conclusions, one has to dive into this topic much more deeply.

What I learnt working for ElcomSoft – the company that recovers passwords and does it very well – is the following: sometimes a password is not enough. You need a good password to make sure your data is protected. WPA requires using passwords that are at least 8 characters long. Such length guarantees quite good protection. The problem as usual is the human factor. We still use admin123 and the like to protect our networks.

Fortunately, there are tools that can help you check how strong your WPA/WPA2-password is. One of such tools is Wireless Security Auditor. It makes use of various hardware for password recovery acceleration and a set of customizable dictionary attacks. The idea is simple: if this monster does not find your WPA/WPA2-password, then it is secure :)

Nice weekend to all.

Posted in Human Factor, Industry News, Legal Questions, Security, Software | No Comments »

Elcomsoft iPhone Password Breaker

Friday, May 7th, 2010

Last week we have released our new product, EPPB, out of beta. We have fixed some bugs, polished GPU acceleration support, added support for Tableau TACC1441 hardware accelerator, making this program the world's first program capable of utilizing computing power of GPUs both from ATI and NVIDIA as well as dedicated hardware accelerators aimed primarily on computer forensics specialists. We have also included ability to run brute-force attacks and not only wordlist-based attacks. Latter were improved with ability to enable/disable individual types of password mutations and set customized level to any of them.

The last, but not the least, we have found that EPPB can handle encrypted backups from Apple's newest tablet, iPad (thanks to Apple for using the same underlying technologies for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad).

Apple iPad

P.S. If anyone's interested, we think that iPad is really cool gadget. It's not a substitute for a laptop, but it's great for catching on emails, surfing web, watching photos or videos or movies and for reading books. And multitouch on 10'' screen is awesome :) .

P.P.S. Yes, this blog post was originally created on iPad.

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Posted in Elcom-News, Software | 2 Comments »

ATI and NVIDIA: Making Friends out of Enemies

Friday, March 12th, 2010

There had been a long standing competition between NVIDIA and ATI which has lasted for years now. And there is no winner so far — just like with Windows vs. Linux or PC vs. Mac debate there are ones who prefer the former and others who prefer the latter. Kind of «religious» issue.

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Posted in Hardware, Software | 3 Comments »

iPhone/iPod Backup Password Recovery

Thursday, February 4th, 2010

ElcomSoft iPhone Password BreakerToday we are pleased to unveil the first public beta of our new product, Elcomsoft iPhone Password Breaker, a tool designed to address password recovery of password-protected iPhone and iPod Touch backups made with iTunes.

In case you do not know, iTunes routinely makes backups of iPhones and iPods being synced to it. Such backups contain a plethora of information, essentially all user-generated data from the device in question. Contacts, calendar entries, call history, SMS, photos, emails, application data, notes and probably much more. Not surprisingly, such information manifests significant value for investigators. To make their job easier there are tools to read information out of iTunes backups, one example of such tool being Oxygen Forensic Suite (http://www.oxygen-forensic.com/). Such tools can not deal with encrypted backups, though.

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Posted in Elcom-News, Security, Software | 3 Comments »

Need to protect your VBA macro ? Simply damage the file !

Thursday, October 8th, 2009

One of our customers sent me two Excel XLA add-ins. When I tried to open that file in the VBA Editor — the "Project is locked" message appeared. Add-in has been already unlocked by our VBA password recovery tool. According to Microsoft article this message may appear in two cases: when the macro is protected by password or when it is digitally signed. I analysed the macro password record and found that the password is empty. MS Excel also showed me that macro have no any digital signatures. Then I looked into protection record with more attention and for example found that:

"[Host Extender Info]" string is replaced to "[Host Extender 1nfo]".

There were some additional similar changes and finally I found that the macro has damaged digital signature record. It’s ignored when macro is running but when we try to open the macro to view — Excel shows the error.

Microsoft has very weak VBA macro protection. That’s why developers are searching for non-standard protection methods. It’s not simple to reconstruct a damaged macro and it may require a lot of time.

If your macro cannot be opened by our password recovery programs — the most probable reason is custom protection that damages some technical records. I cannot say that it’s a good protection. New versions of MS Office may not work correctly with damaged files.

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Posted in Cryptography, Security, Software | 1 Comment »

Now: long-awaited ElcomSoft Password Recovery KIT

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

Click to see this fat and full of cholesterol image in details

Our it-friends from Ukraine (KARPOLAN and Dmitry) highly optimized our developing processes and helped us finalize long-awaited Password Recovery KIT. We won’t go deep into technical details, just have a look at rough visualization.

Posted in Elcom-News, General, Hardware, Software | 2 Comments »

Advanced Office Password Recovery: customizing the preliminary attack

Tuesday, August 4th, 2009

 Every time when you open a document in Advanced Office Password Recovery it performs the preliminary attack in case when the "file open" password is set. This attack tries all passwords that you recovered in past (which are stored in password cache), dictionary attack and finally the brute-force attack is running.

The brute-force attack consists of two parts:

1. Trying digits and latin letters
2. Trying national characters depending on code page set in Windows.

Before this time these parts were hardcoded in the program. The new version of Advanced Office Password Recovery has an option to customize the preliminary brute-force attack. 

Look to the directory where AOPR is installed. There is "attacks.xml" file inside. The first section of this file is the language map:

The codes are Windows language identifiers. You can link any LID to your custom name.

The next section contains predefined charsets:

All charsets are in unicode so you can define any national characters here.

And the final section is "documents". All parts of this section has comments about document types. You can define the "common" charsets and charsets that are related to system language. Each "attack" record defines password length and charset.

In this XML file you can simply change the standard preliminary attack and define the custom charsets for your language. I hope this will help to recover your Office passwords faster.

Posted in Software, Tips & Tricks | 3 Comments »

Office 2010: two times more secure

Tuesday, July 28th, 2009

We are waiting for release of new Microsoft office suite – Office 2010. Right now Microsoft has only technical preview of new Office; this preview has been leaked from Microsoft and everyone can download it with the help of torrent trackers. We’ve got a copy of Office 2010 and analysed its (new) password protection.

Starting from Office 2007, Microsoft used password protection system called ECMA-376, developed by ECMA International. This standard is open and everyone can write ECMA-376 based protection which will be accepted by Microsoft Office. The standard allows to select hash and encryption algorithms as well as the number of hash rounds (up to 10 millions is allowed).

In Office 2007, ECMA-376 with SHA-1 hash and AES-128 encryption is implemented. The number of hash rounds is 50000 that makes password recovery really difficult and slow. Office 2010 also uses SHA-1 and AES-128, but the number of hash rounds is now 100000. Therefore password recovery for new Office files will be two times slower.

Here is a diagram of password recovery speed for Office 2007:

To get a speed for Office 2010, simply divide these values to 2. We’ll get about 175 pps on Core2 6600 and about 8750 pps on Tesla S1070.

Why don’t increase the number of hash rounds to 10 millions ? Security is really important but it always affects usability. The hash is calculating to verify a password and when each document block is decrypted. If we add hash rounds – the document decryption time is increased. If a document is opening in MS Office during one hour – its unacceptable despite of high security.

Anyway – Office 2010 documents will be more secure than Office 2007 ones. And the new encryption has backward compatibility – all Office 2010 documents can be opened in Office 2007. 

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Posted in Cryptography, Security, Software | 3 Comments »

ElcomSoft News

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009

 As the second summer month is coming to an end, it’s time to sum up our news and updates that you might have missed because of vacation in some tropical heaven. Last two weeks brought us really hot days, not only because of the temperature in Moscow City but also due to hard work on program updates. Here is the news:

  • We released the new version of Distributed Password Recovery. It features support for TheBat! and TheBat! Voyager mail clients master passwords (masterkey.dat) and passwords to TheBat! backup files (*.tbk). The GPU acceleration has been extended and now works for Domain Cached Credentials (DCC), as well as Office 2007, Adobe PDF 9, Windows logon passwords (LM and NTLM), WPA/WPA2, and MD5 hashes.
  • A new version of Elcomsoft Wireless Security Auditor was released. EWSA 1.03 is able to extract WPA-PSK password hashes from local systems when Wireless Zero Configuration is used.
  • Our website is now available in Spanish, Italian, and Polish. We promise to add more languages soon to bring our customers information in their native tongues.
  • Follow us on Twitter to be the first to receive our news or become a fan on our brand-new Facebook page. You can also subscribe to our newsletter.

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Posted in Elcom-News, Software | 1 Comment »

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