X
Tech

Vendor claims Acrobat 9 passwords easier to crack than ever

Password recovery software vendor ElcomSoft claims that the password verification mechanism in the new Adobe Acrobat 9 is weaker than the one used in the previous version of Adobe's product, thereby allowing them to improve the brute forcing speed a hundred times faster. The company's claim comes right after Adobe's implementation of 256-bit encryption in their Acrobat 9.
Written by Dancho Danchev, Contributor

Password recovery software vendor ElcomSoft claims that the password verification mechanism in the new Adobe Acrobat 9 is weaker than the one used in the previous version of Adobe's product, thereby allowing them to improve the brute forcing speed a hundred times faster. The company's claim comes right after Adobe's implementation of 256-bit encryption in their Acrobat 9. A PR campaign promoting ElcomSoft's new product, or actual evidence of a flawed implementation on behalf of Adobe?

According to the company, Adobe Acrobat 9 passwords are a hundred times easier to crack than the ones in Acrobat 8 :

"ElcomSoft has discovered that the new PDF protection system implemented in Acrobat 9 is even faster to recover than in previous versions. In fact, a hundred times faster. "The new version of Adobe Acrobat is easier to break", claims ElcomSoft CEO Vladimir Katalov, quoting a speed increase of two orders of magnitude for the new format. "The new product has surprisingly weak protection", he adds. According to ElcomSoft's CEO, using 256-bit AES encryption per se is not enough to achieve ultimate security without employing complex approach and consideration of the entire security system. "

Yesterday, Abobe issued a statement commenting on their implementation of the 256-bit encryption, confirming the trade-off that they made so that 256-bit password protected documents could open faster in Acrobat 9, whereas password recovery tools could indeed achieve better brute forcing speed :

"The current specification for password-based 256-bit AES encryption in PDF provides greater performance than the previous 128-bit AES implementation.  While this allows for 256-bit AES password protected documents to open faster in Acrobat 9, it can also allow external brute-force cracking tools to attempt to guess document passwords more rapidly because fewer processor cycles are required to test each password guess.  These tools operate independently of Acrobat and work directly on a password protected document by repeatedly guessing from lists of dictionary words like "turkey", "potato", and "pie" to see if the document will open."

In order for Adobe to balance usability with security, they improved the passphrase possibilities by introducing new characters and extending the previously limited length of the passphrase, potentially undermining brute forcing attempts in cases where quality passphrases are used. Sadly, that's not always the case. With a great number of people still (convinietly) choosing passwords over passphrases, their encrypted files still remain susceptible to successful brute forcing attempts. Why are passwords chosen over passphrases at the first place? Passphrases naturally result in more failed authentication attempts, are harder to remember, and as related studies show could result in more insecurities since the end users could write them down.

The single most obvious vulnerability that could undermine any encryption algorithm used, remain the use of weak passwords or passphrases. And in times when the very same vendor that's making the claims is improving the brute forcing speed through GPU acceleration with NVIDIA cards, perhaps allowing third-party password recovery software to perform better at PDF files wasn't exactly the best move in this case.

Editorial standards