Office 2013 encryption cracked

Password recovery firm Elcomsoft claims to have cracked the encryption system included in Microsoft Office 2013.

According to Elcomsoft's researchers, Microsoft has done a great job beefing up the encryption of its Office documents. This has forced those who want to break it to move from brute forcing techniques to more advanced methods.

In a blog post the company says,

"Brute force becomes less and less efficient with every new release of Microsoft Office even with full-blown hardware acceleration in place. Office 2013 sets a new standard in document encryption, pretty much taking brute force out of the question. This is why we continue relying on a variety of smart attacks that include a combination of dictionary attacks, masks and advanced permutations."

For now users of Elcomsoft's password cracking recovery software will have to depend on the work of their computer's main processor(s). There is currently no way to use efficient graphics chips to accelerate the breaking of security systems.

However...

"Support for additional hardware accelerators such as ATI and NVIDIA video cards [is] scheduled for a later date."