ElcomSoft

The DMCA case

On July 16, 2001, Dmitry Sklyarov, a Russian citizen employed by ElcomSoft who was at the time visiting the United States for DEF CON, was arrested and jailed for allegedly violating the United States DMCA law by writing ElcomSoft's Advanced eBook Processor software. A landmark court case ensued, setting precedents and attracting much public attention and protest. On December 17, 2002, ElcomSoft was found not guilty of all four charges under the DMCA. Bruce Chizen, CEO of Adobe Systems, had this to say to CNET:

Looking back with 20/20, I wish that we could have had better communication with ElcomSoft, Dmitry Sklyarov and the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) before the whole thing went public. I'm sorry that we weren't able to do that, because I think we could have resolved a lot of the issues.

Thunder Tables

Thunder Tables(R) is the company's own technology developed to ensure guaranteed recovery of Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel documents protected with 40-bit encryption. The technology first appeared in 2007 and employs the time-memory tradeoff method to build pre-computed hash tables, which open the corresponding files in a matter of seconds instead of days. These tables take around ~ 4GB. So far, the technology is used in 2 password recovery programs: Advanced Office Password Breaker and Advanced PDF Password Recovery.

US Patents

7,599,492 - Fast cryptographic key recovery system and method
7,783,046 - Probabilistic cryptographic key identification with deterministic result
7,787,629 - Use of graphics processors as parallel math co-processors for password recovery
7,809,130 - Password recovery system and method
7,929,707 - Use of graphics processors as parallel math co-processors for password recovery

Cracking Wi-Fi Password with GPUs

In 2009 ElcomSoft released a tool that takes WPA/WPA2 Hash Codes and uses brute force methods to guess the password associated with a wireless network. The brute force attack is carried out by testing passwords with a known SSID of a network of which the WPA/WPA2 Hash Code has been captured. The passwords that are tested are generated from a dictionary using various mutation (genetic algorithm) methods, including case mutation (password, PASSWORD, PassWOrD, etc.), year mutation (password, password1992, password67, etc.), and many other mutations to try to guess the correct password.

The advantages of using such methods over the traditional ones, such as rainbow tables, are numerous. Rainbow tables, being very large in size because of the amount of SSID/Password combinations saved, take a long time to traverse, cannot have large numbers of passwords per SSID, and are reliant on the SSID being a common one which the rainbow table has already listed hash codes for (Common ones include linksys, belkin54g, etc.). EWSA, however, uses a relatively small dictionary file (a few megabytes versus dozens of gigabytes for common rainbow tables) and creates the passwords on the fly as needed. Rainbow tables are tested against a captured WPA/WPA2 Hash Code via a computer's processor with relatively low numbers of simultaneous processes possible. EWSA, however, can use a computer's processor(s), with up to 32 logical cores, up to 8 GPUs, all with many CUDA cores(NVIDIA) or Stream Processors(ATI).

Vulnerability in Canon authentication software

On November 30, 2010, Elcomsoft announced that the encryption system used by Canon cameras to ensure that pictures and Exif metadata have not been altered was flawed and cannot be fixed. On that same day, Dmitry Sklyarov gave a presentation at the Confidence 2.0 conference in Prague demonstrating the flaws. Among others, he showed an image of an astronaut planting a flag of the Soviet Union on the moon; all the images pass Canon's authenticity verification.