The new version supports the new Adobe Acrobat 9 format, offering a hundred
times increase in password recovery speed for the new format thanks to a
security weakness discovered by the company in Adobe Acrobat 9.
ElcomSoft, the company that discovered a security weakness in Adobe’s
eBook software back in 2001, has found vulnerability in another Adobe Product.
While Adobe advertises Acrobat 9 as the most secure PDF production tool ever
with enhanced 256-bit encryption, ElcomSoft has discovered that the new PDF
protection system implemented in Acrobat 9 is even faster to recover than in
previous versions. In fact, a hundred times faster.
“The new version of Adobe
Acrobat is easier to break,” claims ElcomSoft CEO Vladimir Katalov, quoting a
speed increase of two orders of magnitude for the new format. “Passwords of 8
symbols or less are no longer secure,” he adds. According to ElcomSoft’s CEO,
using 256-bit AES encryption per se is not enough to achieve ultimate security
without employing complex approach and consideration of the entire security
system.
