[TML] Observation on Mongoose Traveller main book

[Jerry W Barrington]

On 8/10/08 9:32 PM, "Ross Winn" <ross.winn at gmail.com> wrote:

> Drivethru uses locked PDFs, however there is considerable software
> available to annotate even locked PDF files.

Yup.  Just in researching this discussion, I found an open-source password
hacker.  It can use brute force ranging from 1 to 32 characters (you pick
the charset or use it's default) or a dictionary file.  Compiled on my
machine in seconds.

I'm testing it on a PDF bill statement of mine, just for fun.  :)  Knowing
that the open password is a phone number, I project 100 hours max to find it
(only 800 MHz machine).  That could be optimized, if I added a phone number
checker instead of checking every 10 digit number (many 10 digit numbers are
not valid phone numbers, and I could reasonably assume the area code...).
Not knowing anything about the owner password... it could take a very long
time.  Using the set [a-zA-Z0-9], it's done all 1, 2, 3, and 4 character
combos in about 3.5 hours.

Although I know even the brute force could be optimized much better than
this.  Like this compile has debug info, etc...