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From Wildbison

Yesterday I was talking about secrets hiding and cryptography. A buddy of mine mentioned he was able to crack any Word document in one day as a maximum. He stated 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 in fact in a position to crack it in a couple of minutes.

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

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

I told you this small story as a metaphor of how issues actually go when speaking about encryption: it is nearly often a matter of approach, and not tools.

Word has an excellent encryption program, although it is restricted by US crucial length limitation: if you just know how to do it, you can super-encrypt a Word document, and be certain that no-one (except, probably, CIA) will succeed in cracking it. The difficulty is that it is not effortless to encrypt a Word document well: you have to know a factor or two just before undertaking it. Just pressing "Shield this document with a password" does not work (and tends to make folks like my friend boast himself!)

The story has morale: marketplace lack of tools that make severe encryption simply. Thats one of encryption application residence missions: to make effortless to use, but significant encryption tools (such as Folder Crypt).

Secondarily, that it is usually heard of folks cracking programs, computer software barriers, ciphered documents and this tends to make the casual Web user consider that no genuine security is achievable on Net. Again, this happens simply because encryption processes and policies are typically weak, when not at all bugged.

On the contrary, information encrypted following secure processes and using encryption regular tools stay secret.

Oh, by the way: to safely encrypt a Word document just follow these measures:

1. Start off Word.

two. Choose File | Save as.

3. Pick the Tools extended menu selection.

four. Choose Security Choices from the drop-down list.

5. Click the Advanced button.

six. From the Encryption Type dialog, copy the name of the encryption variety name and encryption algorithm from the Choose an encryption sort list.

7. RC4, Microsoft enhanced RSA and AES Cryptographic provider

8. Set maximum essential length to 128