Thats easy hacking, pal!

Yesterday I was talking about secrets hiding and cryptography. A friend of mine said he was able to crack any Word document in one day as a maximum. He said it was not a problem of password complexity: he knew how to strip Word protection away. As a proof, he took an old Word document and he was actually able to crack it in a few minutes.

I said he was only lucky and that I was ready to bet a non trivial sum of money that he would not be able to crack a Word document encrypted by me. He laughed out loud, he said I just wanted to lose money… but he did not accept my bet.

Then I sent the Word document encrypted by me to him anyway: he is still trying to crack it (a week is already passed… but I think the encryption will stand against his attacks for ten/fifteen years).

I told you this little story as a metaphor of how things really go when talking about encryption: it is almost always a matter of process, and not tools.

Word has an excellent encryption system, although it is limited by US key length limitation: if you just know how to do it, you can super-encrypt a Word document, and be sure that no-one (except, perhaps, CIA) will succeed...