Hiya. I wrote this as it was just the next logical step in my encryption 'phase' and it provided a service that I recently needed. I spent a while figuring out the encryption algorithym used to store the password for the internet connnection on a machine. Set up by the...Internet control panel. Basically this will take the encrypted password and decrypt it, should you need to. The need to do this is rare as you could just copy the whole prefs file and then the password would be ready in your internet control panel to connect, but you wouldn't know what it was. But as there are occasionally times when you need to find it, here's IPD! The hard part is locating the encrypted password, as the pref file is a bout 220k and the password seems to move about a lot. The best method I found is to use rescompare. Here are the steps:
1) Put a copy of stolen prefs file into your prefs folder.
2) Change the passwords (E-mail & news) to anything in your internet control panel - you dont need old password.
3) Now use ResCompare to comapre the two prefs files. It happily splits up the resource fork into nice chunks. The parts you are looking for are the 'MailPassword' and 'NewsAuthPassword' these should be the only ones listed if you have done it right.
4) Open the MailPassword bit(keep in mind that the tweo passwords are most probably the same). Ok?
6) The encrypted pasword for the master file in this case will be : 7$<?=366
7) The three letters from the third along top box and the five from the third along bottom box (Hopefully this will become alot clearer as you try it!). The encrypted password(the one you set) of the compared file will be the three and the five letters stuck together of the end boxes.
You can try all this on your own prefs file to test it if you don't believe me. It is the easiest way! Once you have done it it will become very easy.
Don't use this for illegal purposes! Or don't get caught! Have Fun! If you know a surefire way to locate the encrypted password from within the prefs file I would sure like to know.
