Augmenting password recovery with online profiling

In investigations involving password-protected artefacts, password recovery can be a daunting task, consuming resources and causing delays in investigations. This paper describes work conducted to examine whether using online publicly available information to generate individual–related electronic profiles reduces automated password recovery time. In order to accomplish this, a web crawler was developed to capture profiles, which were then processed by Password Recovery Tool kit ‘PRTK’. During an exploratory study, four passwords of 18 password-protected Word documents were recovered faster using this technique.