RE: [libreoffice-users] password problem

If the password is entered wrong, usually the first file that is decrypted with that password will 
fail a checksum check and there will be a pretty-immediate failure.

If one of the files is corrupted, its decryption will fail the checksum check after some amount of 
decryption of other parts of the document have happened. It might still treat it as a password 
error, even though the password has been working until the particular part of the ODF document 
fails.  If the software offers to attempt to recover, you should try it.  (I suspect it is not 
designed to do that in this case.)

One thing you can do with the file that fails is try to open it with a Zip utility and run a test 
on it.  If the Zip tests all right, it means the corruption occurred during encryption, not later, 
during writing.  If the Zip indicates any part of the document is corrupted, you might see if a Zip 
repair utility can help.

The corruption could be in the key information rather than in the file (which would be very bad, 
since there is almost no way to recover if that is the case).  If the corruption is in the file, 
the form of encryption used tends to limit mistakes (that is, things tend to go right again after a 
while).  Because the decrypted file is a compressed stream inside of a Zip, decompression can also 
go off the rails.  But it may be possible to recover whatever there is.  But at this point, 
password recovery won't help because your password is not the problem.  It takes some serious 
forensic tools to now attempt a recovery, and I don't know who might have those that work with the 
encryptions that are used for ODF documents.

You may also be able to find a backup of the unencrypted file on your system.  You should look for 
that.  Also, if you can reconstruct from an earlier version of the file, that would be good. 
JeepNut was able to find a backup to recover a seriously-corrupted file (crash during save) in a 
post last Friday.  Look in Tools | Options | LibreOffice | Paths and see where the Backups are in 
the list of Paths used by LibreOffice.  You might also be able to find something in Temporary files 
(that's a stretch).

 - Dennis

-----Original Message-----
From: Bill Gradwohl [mailto:bill@ycc.com] 
Sent: Thursday, August 04, 2011 20:54
To: users@global.libreoffice.org
Subject: Re: [libreoffice-users] password problem

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On 08/04/2011 08:44 PM, Bob Stia wrote:
> I have a document that I have had for years. Time to time I must open it, edit 
> it and close it again. It is Libreoffice password protected.  A few days ago 
> I opened the fdocument and then after editing closed it agaim. The other 
> night I tried to open it again and the password failed.

Bob

Look at what happens carefully. Even experiment on another test doc to
see a slight difference that may be significant.

I've experienced password failures on password protected documents part
way through the loading process after it successfully took my password
and then manufactured a bogus password failure message a certain
distance into the loading process.

The password failure messages are different depending on if you really
keyed in a wrong password or it pops up a bogus message.

Create a test document, password protect it and then ATTEMPT to open it
with a bad password. Is that the password message your real doc is
getting or is it another one? The other one is a bogus message after the
file's been corrupted.

I noticed this on a large spreadsheet that takes quite a while to load.
It would take my password, start to load, and then fail some seconds
later on some internal error and puts up a bogus message.

- -- 
Bill Gradwohl
Roatan, Honduras
504 9 899 2652
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