The research on Outlook password recovery

Outlook is the email client in the Microsoft office package, which has become one of the most widely applied email processing systems in the personal and commercial office environment. This paper studies the password recovery for various accounts in Outlook and we find the method of online recovery by exploiting the Windows cryptographic interface DPAPI for sensitive data. This recovery method enables one to retrieve his password very conveniently. Furthermore, we investigate the inner workings of encryption and decryption functions in DPAPI and present a detailed analysis on the encrypted data type, storage structure, cryptographic algorithm and key generation. To the best of our knowledge, for the first time we give the way of offline password recovery which could be remarkably helpful in the computer forensics.