September 21, 2011, at 09:50 AM
PDF Password Brute Force
So I was sent a PDF file which was “protected” by a password, which was supposed to be my date of birth in ddmmyyyy format. But that didn’t work, even when I tried various variants of it. I even installed Adobe Reader in case it was some proprietary nonsense (Chrome is my PDF viewer these days). So I emailed them to see what was up.
However, I couldn’t help also wondering whether I could brute-force the password. If it was a typo then I would have a search space of 1,000,000,000 possibilities (assuming an extra character as part of the typo, and digits only). If they’d just used someone else’s date of birth, the size is a lot lower, more so if I assume a reasonable range of years.
So I came up with this (or rather, an uglier variant):
setlocal enabledelayedexpansion
for /l %%y in (1970,1,1990) do for /l %%m in (1,1,12) do for /l %%d in (1,1,31) do (
set pw=0%%m%%y
set pw=0%%d!pw:~-6!
set pw=!pw:~-8!
pdftotext -q -upw !pw! %1
if not errorlevel 1 goto :foundit
)
goto :eof
:foundit
echo Password is %pw%
It does a bit of unnecessary checking of impossible dates (31st February, for example) but it found the answer for me in about 15s.
(pdftotext is part of xpdf, which is an awesome tool for manipulating PDF files into not-PDF files.)
So I emailed them again to suggest that their security is rubbish, and I didn’t need that new file after all... it’d be nice to imagine they’ll do something about it, but I don’t have much hope...
July 27, 2011, at 05:36 AM
Mini Review: Frogger
This is a sequel of sorts to the original Frogger arcade game from 1981 (and its many ports). Apparently due to legal issues, there weren’t many sequels until the late 90s. This version was a little earlier, but was never released (possibly for the same reason) although it is a complete game. Refreshes of early-80s arcade games are often terrible, but Frogger acquits itself remarkably well.
July 26, 2011, at 12:46 PM
Mini Review: Gear Works
I’m a sucker for puzzle games, but the genre’s not well-populated on the SMS (apart from Korean MSX conversions). The Game Gear is better suited to the genre so there are more to be found. Gear Works did the rounds on home computers and some consoles back in 1993. What we have here seems to be a conversion from the Game Boy, but is it as interesting as you might hope?
July 25, 2011, at 03:49 AM
Mini Review: Fred Couples Golf
There’s plenty of golf games on every platform you can think of, but I’d never played one for more than a few minutes. So, on a whim, I chose Fred Couples Golf. (Or is is Fred Couples’ Golf?) It’s a reasonably mature golf game, albeit without any attempt at 3D, and the richer colour palette of the Game Gear is likely to make for a prettier game. So, what’s it like?
July 01, 2011, at 11:19 AM
Micro Review: Galaga ‘91
Short, annoying (slow firing rate, enemies move faster than your bullets), no powerups, not much variety.
June 24, 2011, at 11:23 AM
PS1JERT Source Released
I posted the source to the Phantasy Star 1 Japanese to English ReTranslation on the appropriate page. It’s lacking history - I have an SVN dump that’s been manually unwedged, I hope, and some crappy backups made during the stage where the SVN server was unavailable. It’s not brilliantly documented - there’s a huge amount going on in there. But it builds, and I’ve finally pulled my finger out and released it, for better or for worse.
If you want to get into hacking on it, you may need to upgrade to a 32-bit version of TASM, and/or spend the time to port it to a nicer assembler. (A great deal could probably be done using WLA DX’s .background feature, for example.) Then try to figure some of it out... it’s hard work. If you need more characters, think about using tile flipping for b/p/d/q, overloading 1/l/I and O/0, etc, and then figure out how the hell you do that. In fact, you’d be very sensible if you
- put it into a source control system
- got some other people involved (Z80 hacker, translator, ...)
- discuss things on the SMS Power! forums so others can learn from your work, especially people working on a translation to the same language
Officially, the project is not licensed at all. I intend to be liberal but you should get permission before you release.
May 23, 2011, at 11:45 AM
Mini Review: Alien Syndrome
Alien Syndrome was first an arcade “run-and-gun” game in 1987, then a Master System port in 1988, then a port to every system on the planet, and later (1992) a Game Gear sequel with the same name. There was another sequel in 2007 but we don’t care about that. Here I shall talk about the two Sega 8-bit home console versions, of course.
