Deciphering Transwrite files

[vroom6sri]

Howdy!

Does anyone know of a utility that can decrypt Transwrite files that have been encrypted in Transwrite many moons ago but for which I have forgotten the password for?

[Cylon]

What is TransWrite? A word processor?

Can you provide example files? Or the program TransWrite?

[vroom6sri]

TransWrite is indeed a word processor of sorts. It's very basic (I don't hink that you can change fonts or text sizes) but I used it extensively at college.

I should be able to create a TransWrite file with some text and then encrypt it in TransWrite and save that one seperately. Once done I will upload them.

[vroom6sri]

A family member who teaches IT at university has failed to crack my encrypted Transwrite file. Is there anyone on here who would be willing to take on the challenge or are there any websites you can recommend that might be able to crack it?

[derSammler]

Originally Posted by vroom6sri

I should be able to create a TransWrite file with some text and then encrypt it in TransWrite and save that one seperately. Once done I will upload them.

Just for the record: that won't help anyone, as different password means different encryption (result). You would need to provide the actual files you want to have decrypted. But I assume you talk about personal files, so...

Unless your life depends on it, I would just forget about it.

Given the age of the program and the fact it did run on a stock A500, the encryption is probably very simple. It's also probably easy to figure out by disassembling the code. But still, it won't help. You can't find out what password you used back then - this would require the same original file encrypted and decrypted. Of course, if you had the decrypted one, this topic would not exist.

[desiv]

When you say encrypted, do you mean actually encrypted or encoded?
(I know, it's a subtle/silly difference)

By that I mean, a lot of programs save their data by encoding it using something simple like RLE or something to make it smaller and more manageable...

But there was never an intention of keeping it secure, so it wasn't encrypted...
Yeah, it could be the same thing...

What I am getting at I suppose it, does Transwrite (yes, I did use it back in the day, but can't remember) have an option for encryption (password protected or something like that) for securing files, and that's what you are talking about?

Or do you just mean converting Transwrite files to text, which I am thinking would just be encoding...

If that makes sense...

OK, I just loaded up an ADF of Transwrite...
I typed "This is a test" and saved it to RAM: in a file called test.
When I went to the shell and typed "type test" it displayed:
This is a test

So it appears that Transwrite saves as ASCII...
You should just be able to open those files with any text editor...
And I am not seeing any encryption options in the Save dialog in Transwrite...

Nope, I found it!!
There is a Encrypt in the Special menu...
I never used that...
Hmmm....

Interesting...
It encrypts it actively in Transwrite... (In that, when I select Encrypt, the display shows only the encrypted text... Funny.
So you have to decrypt it to work on the file.
Then encrypt it and then save the encrypted version...

[Phantasm]

Originally Posted by derSammler

Just for the record: that won't help anyone, as different password means different encryption (result). You would need to provide the actual files you want to have decrypted. But I assume you talk about personal files, so...

Unless your life depends on it, I would just forget about it.

Given the age of the program and the fact it did run on a stock A500, the encryption is probably very simple. It's also probably easy to figure out by disassembling the code. But still, it won't help. You can't find out what password you used back then - this would require the same original file encrypted and decrypted. Of course, if you had the decrypted one, this topic would not exist.

Once you understand the encryption algorithms you can write something to brute force the decryption. Using modern hardware you will be able to brute force every combination of letters and numbers to a reasonable number of characters. This would most likely yield the result unless it was a particularly secure password

[vroom6sri]

Thanks for the info and suggestions. @desiv I see you played around with the Transwrite program to understand what I was referring to. Basically it seems the word you type in acts as some sort of key that is then used to encrypt the file. The keys seem to be only 3 to 15 characters long and only letters are allowed but they are case sensitive.

The file I want to try to get into is unfortunately encrypted at least twice IE I used the encrypt function in Transwrite to make the file unreadable to the human eye and then encrypted it again by using the encrypt function again.

I did send my family member a couple of example files that were made up of 21832 zeros along with the passwords used for each file (1 encrypted only once with 1 password and 1 encrypted twice with 2 separate passwords) to see if that would help him crack it but sadly no joy.