Adobe Acrobat 9 Passwords Easy to Remember and Crack
Adobe has made a big change in Acrobat 9, often we see a new version of software has some more new features and more security improvements over the previous version of software but Adobe has changed this thing and Acrobat 9 uses simple passwords that most people use because it’s easy to remember but at the same easy and simple passwords are easy to crack also. Acrobat 9 supports password-based 256-bit AES encryption rather than 128-bit. it can also allow external brute-force cracking tools to attempt to guess document passwords more rapidly because fewer processor cycles are required to test each password guess. These tools operate independently of Acrobat and work directly on a password protected document by repeatedly guessing from lists of dictionary words like "turkey", "potato", and "pie" to see if the document will open.
Acrobat 9 now supports pass-phrases of 127 Roman characters in length for 256-bit AES encryption and added support for Unicode characters while Adobe 8 used pass-phrases of up to 32 Roman characters in length for 128-bit AES encryption. Acrobat 9 pass-phrase supports 4 times as long and support a greater number of international characters and symbols to be entered by keyboards around the world, which can greatly increase document protection when used properly.
For higher-assurance applications, Adobe continues to recommend using PKI-based encryption or Adobe LiveCycle Rights Management encryption – instead of user-generated document open passwords. Acrobat and Adobe Reader 9 now support 256-bit AES encryption for both of these environments. 256-bit AES encryption is widely known to be stronger than 128-bit AES. Document protection can also be increased with hardware tokens – including three-factor authentication with a smartcard, PIN and biometric.
Source : Acrobat 9 and password encryption
