How Password Recovery Is Different From Password Cracking?
There are plenty of ways to break into an account and why waste precious time with password recovery when you can crack your way in? Why as investigators some passwords have to be broken while some have to be recovered? This is because all types of protection are not the same. There are plenty of password protection types with respective use cases. This post lists some of the different password protection types and how password recovery applies in some cases while password recovery applies in others.
What is password cracking?
Password cracking is a type of password recovery used to recover password from a computer and gain access to the data in the device. Password cracking is of various kinds and given that it need not be a complex technique but a brute-force attack will do the trick.
What is password recovery?
Password recovery is a technique used to retrieve a password with the aid of different unlocking solutions. The password recovery method is simple as the data in the device is not encrypted in most cases. The password recovery process is usually instant and easy compared to password cracking. Password cracking as mentioned above is a type of password recovery that employs brute-force attack.
The different types of password recovery used for a variety of password protection are as follows:
The password locks access
The password here is a lock. The data stored can either be encrypted or not encrypted at all. The perfect example of a lock would be older Android smartphones that used the legacy Full Disk Encryption without Secure Startup. In such devices, the passcode only locks access to the user interface. By the time the device asks for a password, the data is already decrypted making use of hardware credentials and the ‘default_password’.
Weak encryption
In some cases, the data might be encrypted and the password will not be known and the password can’t be restored alongside the data and leaving the entire protection scheme under vulnerability. In instances where the password is unknown, the binary encryption key can be used to decrypt the data. One key of the binary key may be able to quickly gain access to data of the encrypted file and the key is not stored alongside the data.
Weak encryption is a case when the encryption key is too short. If the key is small and vulnerable, anyone can attack the encryption rather than a password. Poor encryption implementation can also lead to weak encryption. The advanced Elcomsoft password recevery can be used to identify the area of vulnerability and gain access to files such as the old Zip archives.
Password recovery bundle
The password recovery bundle by Elcomsoft offers advanced password recovery capabilities such as Break complex passwords, recover encryption keys and more.
- Break more than 300 types of data passwords
- The software works about 20 to 250 times faster with the use of hardware acceleration.
- Supports remote management and deployment
Bottom line
The Elcomsoft password recovery is a powerful and intuitive unlocking solution that every forensic investigator requires. Get your demo today from Pelorus, the top-notch digital forensic provider.
