EH-Net

Looking for any tools/insights into getting past a Word 2007 doc with password protection (128 AES).  Seems like a pretty tough nut to crack.  I see Elcomsoft has a commercial tool - are there any open source alternatives?

Microsoft's encryption in Office docs has gotten a lot better.   We typically use FTK's or Paraben's decryption suite for cracking these passwords.   If it's a long password, the distributed architecture of these tools helps.  They are obviously commercial tools though.   I haven't seen any open source tools for this.

Only possibilities I know are either a bruteforce-attack or a dictionary-attack. Do you know how the password looks like?
Didn't came across any open-source tools for this yet.

If it is not something very confidential or similar maybe someone can help you who has such software available..

Thanks for the tips - I've used the FTK Imager program but didn't know about their password product.  I just looked through the user guide and didn't see that their tool does Office 2007 docs though.

I'd not heard of Paraben before but just looked at their products.  If I need to go commercial I'll probably lean towards the Elcomsoft tools since they seem to be cheaper, unless someone has a reason to avoid them.  I'm currently trying their Office recovery tool in demo mode, using a series of dictionary files.  Their brute force portion is pretty limited in demo mode, but the dictionary mode is available.

It's a pretty straight forward process, brute-forcing a password.  My only suggestion is to use a tool that supports a distributed attack.   20 machines cracking a password is much faster than 1. 

Although it may not be usual to have 20 PCs at home. ;)

I have about 20 probably, although not many of them actually work :)   

it is too hard to crack office 2007!