Building a Better Password

[John Korchok]

After reading the enormous number of messages by people who claim to have
"forgotten" the passwords to their VBA projects (I don't believe any of you,
folks!) and seen the huge number of shareware password crackers out there, I
realize I have to do more to protect my projects than a simple password.

The most promising approach seems to be to enter non-keyboard characters
that won't copy to the clipboard. I am pretty sure this is possible because
of a message from someone on another board claiming to need help recovering
just such a password:

Message from Nathan Gutman, 12-31-2003
"A few months ago someone in this group suggested to recover a lost VBA
password using the free VBAKey by Pathologist.
I tried and it displayed the recovered password using a series of
chachacters which can not be entered from the keyboard.
Has anyone else tried this program?
Do you know how to convert this characters into a readable text
sequence?"

Obviously Nathan is not trying to recover a password of his own creation,
but it struck me that this method would be more secure. I have tried editing
the encrypted password section of my VBA project file with a disk editor,
but that just caused the VBE to crash when trying to open the macros.

Does anyone have any light bulbs as a place to start? Are there any VBA
Addins out there that would do this? A programming solution?


--

John Korchok

Word Lab Systems, Inc.
www.wordlab.ca

 

[Steve Hudson]

G'day "John Korchok" <[email protected]>,

<User cannot reply, pacemaker has been overloaded by a giggle attack>

email me, let's talk.

After reading the enormous number of messages by people who claim to have
"forgotten" the passwords to their VBA projects (I don't believe any of you,
folks!) and seen the huge number of shareware password crackers out there, I
realize I have to do more to protect my projects than a simple password.

The most promising approach seems to be to enter non-keyboard characters
that won't copy to the clipboard. I am pretty sure this is possible because
of a message from someone on another board claiming to need help recovering
just such a password:

Message from Nathan Gutman, 12-31-2003
"A few months ago someone in this group suggested to recover a lost VBA
password using the free VBAKey by Pathologist.
I tried and it displayed the recovered password using a series of
chachacters which can not be entered from the keyboard.
Has anyone else tried this program?
Do you know how to convert this characters into a readable text
sequence?"

Obviously Nathan is not trying to recover a password of his own creation,
but it struck me that this method would be more secure. I have tried editing
the encrypted password section of my VBA project file with a disk editor,
but that just caused the VBE to crash when trying to open the macros.

Does anyone have any light bulbs as a place to start? Are there any VBA
Addins out there that would do this? A programming solution?

Steve Hudson

Word Heretic, Sydney, Australia
Tricky stuff with Word or words for you.
wordheretic.com

If answers r 2 terse, ask again or hassle an MVP,
at least they get recognition for it then.
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