Hy everybody,
I want to retrieve the ple file password of old conversations in my old pc. I don't remember it. But if i'm connect on this pc, it will encrypt it with the same password. So it's certainly stored somewere. Can you help me to find it? If it's in the windows registry in what key can i found it?
Thank you

You can not retrieve it. It is not stored as-is. Instead, a public and private hashkey is derived from it and that is stored instead.
This can be used to encrypt logs, but not to decrypt them. To decrypt the logs you need the literal password itself.

EDIT: lol, MeEtc, that was a telepathy-moment

The password is not saved in plaintext in the registry, rather as a one way encryption key. The way the encryption method is set up is so this key can be used to encrypt chat logs only, but not decrypt them.

The only way to actually decrypt and view your chat logs is by remembering the password.

darn, too slow

Ah, ok,
So if it's like that, can i have the structure of the ple file, and more details about the hasching method to extract the public/private key? I remember that my password have 8 characters in a french keyboard so about 150 possibilities. If i want to brute force it i have to do a system call to logviewer.exe, and it will be very slow. If i can extract just the crypted string, the brute force will be more powerful.
Thank you

The encryption is done using the cryptography API's of Windows, that's all I can say.

And I'm not sure if I can/should give you the structure layout of an encrypted file either. As such I'm not going to give it to you, but with some researching you can find out. Though, knowing the file structure isn't going to help you much (if it would be that easy people would have broken the encryption years ago). You do have to brute force it no matter what, unless you know the exact password.

But I dunno how you came up with those 150 possebilities though... If your password is 8 characters long and it consists of basic alphanumerical characters (not even counting in the extra french accented characters), there are 9.13E+46 possebilities!

So, sorry, if I can't/won't help you further.

Ok, thank you anyway