Cracking a Microsoft Word 2003 Protected Document
Microsoft Word 2003 has a nice document protection feature. It provides formatting restriction and editing restriction. You can apply these protections and without providing a password, nobody would be able to make any kind of change in your document. The feature is found in security options in “Save/Save as” window. There you’ll find “Protect Document” button which will bring the “Protect Document” pane. (Detail is available here)
Last week I received a RFP from one of our clients. It was a 372 pages document. While making a proposal, we usually do a lot of copy/paste activity from RFP. The document was protected so copying any text from the document was not allowed (the feature doesn’t even allow to select/highlight the text). I started working on the idea to somehow crack the password and make things selectable and the very first thing that came into my mind was the “Save as” option. I saved the document as a text file. It not only removed the password from the file but also took all the formatting away and made the documented look like an alien message received from planet Mars.
Who in the world would like to jump into a 372 pages text file which was of course converted from Microsoft Word 2003’s well formatted file. So I started thinking of another way to keep all the formatting. And this is how I achieved it. I saved the document into an html format, opened that document into notepad and started exploring the source code. Then I found this line:
"< w:UnprotectPassword>E1FA84B3 "
Looks familiar?? NOPE!!! Well this is the line that solved the problem. I just deleted “E1FA84B3”, saved it and then opened the HTML document in Microsoft Word. Then I followed the reverse strategy, saved the document as Microsoft Word file and in security options when I clicked on “Unprotect Document”......... volaaaaaaaaa...... Microsoft Word didn’t ask me for a password. It saved the document back into Microsoft Word 2003 format without asking for the password. The new UNPROTECTED document had a proper formatting; even the header, footers and page numbers were restored.