Investigating a BitLocker-encrypted hard drive can be challenging, especially if the encryption keys are protected by the computer’s hardware protection, the TPM. In this article, we’ll talk about the protection that TPM chips provide to BitLocker volumes, and discuss vulnerabilities found in today’s TPM modules.

This is the final part of the series of articles comparing Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery with Hashcat. We’ve already compared the features, the price and performance of the two tools. In this study, we tried breaking passwords to several common formats, including Word document, an encrypted ZIP archive, and a VeraCrypt container. We summarized our experiences below.

Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery and Hashcat support a number of different attacks ranging from brute-force all the way to scriptable, dictionary-based attacks. The costs and performance are extremely important factors. We charge several hundred dollars for what, in the end, can be done with a free tool. Which tool has better performance, and are the extra features worth the price premium? Let’s check it out.

Modern applications use highly secure and thus deliberately slow algorithms for verifying passwords. For this reason, the password recovery process may take a lot of time and require extreme computational resources. You can build your own powerful cluster to accelerate brute-force attacks, but if you only need to recover a password every once in a while, maintaining your own cluster may not be the best investment. Cloud services can help do a one-off job faster. For a long time, Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery had supported Amazon cloud services with automatic deployment on Amazon’s powerful GPU-accelerated servers. The latest update brings support for Microsoft Azure, adding the ability to automatically deploy Password Recovery Agents to virtual machines created in Microsoft Azure. In this article I will describe the deployment steps.

Cloud services such as Amazon EC2 can quickly deliver additional computing power on demand. Amazon’s recent introduction of the a type of EC2 Compute Units made this proposition much more attractive than ever before. With Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery now supporting Amazon’s new P2 instances, each with up to 16 GPU units, users can get as much speed as they need the moment they need. In this article, we’ll discuss the benefits of using cloud compute units for password recovery, and provide a step-by-step guide on how to add virtual instances to Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery. (more…)

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:

 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.

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.