Authors: Khawla Al-Wehaibi, Tim Storer, and Brad Glisson
DFRWS USA 2011
Abstract
In investigations involving password-protected artifacts, password recovery can be a daunting task, consuming resources and causing delays in investigations. This paper describes work conducted to examine whether using online publicly available information to generate individual-related electronic profiles reduces automated password recovery time. In order to accomplish this, a web crawler was developed to capture profiles, which were then processed by Password Recovery Tool kit ‘PRTK’. During an exploratory study, four passwords of 18 password-protected Word documents were recovered faster using this technique.