Under most circumstances, it is not necessary to recover Windows Logon passwords because the network administrator can simply reset them. However, after a password is reset, EFS, Credentials, and Private Keys from certificates are unavailable, and can only be made available by recovering the lost Windows Logon password. If the password is long and complex, a single computer's brute force attack may not be powerful enough to recover it. Elcomsoft's Distributed Password Recovery product is designed to recover passwords in situations such as these.

Before Distributed Password Recovery, the most effective way to recover a lost password was to put the locked file on the fastest machine in the company, and use brute force to attack the password. Distributed Password Recovery lets you coordinate all of the unused computing power of every computer on your LAN or WAN, and use distributed processing to restore the lost password. Distributed Password Recovery installs "Agents" onto as many computers on the network as the user desires. Each of these Agents uses brute force to try to recover the lost password.

The program ensures that these Agents work together, and combine their computing power to find the lost password. The more computing power available, the faster the recovery speed. Another module of the program, the Console, is designed to manage the Agents. This solution is best for big enterprises with thousands of clients, when employees leave without un-protecting their mission-critical documents. The program restores passwords for PDF files, Word and Excel documents encrypted with 40-bit keys (Office 97/2000 compatible), as well as more recent documents (Office XP/2003) encrypted with CSP. Office 97/2000 documents can also be decrypted by recovery of encryption keys instead of password, and that type of attack gives a guaranteed result regardless of password length and complexity. The program can also handle Personal Information Exchange certificates (PKCS#12) and PGP encryption, including PGP secret key rings (.SKR files), PGP disks (.PGD files), and PGP self-decrypting archives. Distributed Password Recovery can be easily installed in enterprise networks with thousands of computers and generates little traffic. The Agents work in the background without harming other programs. T

That is, they use the CPU only when it is in its idle state. An administrator can get a report about the work that is done. When a password is restored or a document is decrypted, the program informs the administrator by e-mail, and starts processing the next task. Using the Console, an administrator can also keep statistics. The software has a plug-in architecture and can be easily extended to support more document formats and types of encryption. Future releases will support ZIP and RAR archives, Intuit Quicken files, PasswordSafe containers, and more.