15-Minute Reviews :: Encryption Analyzer Professional v1.0b513

Greetings and welcome to another 15-Minute Review. Today’s review is on Encryption Analyzer version 1.0 build 513 by “

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“Encryption Analyzer finds all password-protected or encrypted files on a PC.

Are you sure that you still remember passwords for your important files? Full system scan usually takes under an hour. If you need to unprotect your file, Encryption Analyzer runs the required password recovery module.

Runs from a USB flash drive with no need to install. Scans systems over the network, performs scheduled scans and supports batch mode.”

Quick Pros

• Interface is dead-simple
• Scan speeds are relatively quick
• Was capable of finding a renamed file

Quick Cons

• Can only scan drive-mounted resources
• Appears to only find files types it knows about
• No built-in decryption software – It is an (expensive) add-on
• Few Professional functions do not appear to exist

Expansion

This application is very simple in functionality; Scan your drives for encrypted files. The interface is easy to get going; When you first launch the application, you will see a set of 3 Quick Start options on the left of the screen in the sidepane, with a link to the helpfile. In the main area, you are offered 2 (and up to 3) groups of options. First is Type of Scan which is a choice between Full (Scan everything), Recommended (Skip system folders), and Fast (Skip database files and system folders). The group is selecting where to scan; A predefined list of My Computer, My Documents, All Local Drives and Selected Drives and Folders. The last option group appears when you click on Selected Drives and Folders which allows you to pick from which parts or each drive to scan. One you click Start Scan, it begins the scan, with a progress bar along the top, a Pause and Stop button, and a table displaying found files. While scanning you will see statistics on the scanning during the scan including scanning speeds. The interface is really simple and most of what options exist can be found on the right-click menu for the files or in the menus.

Scanning is relatively quick – It didn’t take a vast amount of scanning time for both my network resources or for my drives, which is a good thing. I did find that the scan speed information seems a bit off at times; I tried rescanning a network drive a few times and each time came out with vastly different statistics but still about the same amount of time. I’m not sure if the one-hour statement made on Giveaway of the Day would be a good statement to make as since I’m assuming 80GB of files would end up being a good portion of a day to scan. During my testing, I did plant one file, RAR with a password, that had both its name and extension changed to dead.doc and the application did identify this file as well as being a RAR.

While trying the application, I quickly found that you can not scan just any network resource; It must be mounted to a drive letter to be able to work with it. This could be a fairly large hindrance in a corporate situation where a computer may be locked down from mapping and instead you must run another scan from an IT workstation on the network file mount instead.

As I found in the testing above with the renamed RAR file, this application scans for known filetypes. I had a file I had encrypted with a previously-reviewed title placed on my test system as well, and it didn’t locate that file. While the description states that it will find all password-protected or encrypted files, in truth, it can only find ones that are on its list (See the list here ) – It covers the files created from 34 different applications according to the list, which isn’t a great number considering the number of applications that do encrypt their files.

The biggest downfall with this application is it is only a locator; It does not actually decrypt anything. While the application has the menu option of ‘Recover Password’, it actually needs to use other software provided by this company as well. While it appears you can purchase individual modules, I do not know if this will interface with anything besides Passware Kit which starts at $355.00 (With an ‘upgrade subscription of $195.00 for one year) – A very expensive add-on.

An issue I did have is while this application is displayed as the Professional version and does appear to have some of the professional functions (Such as the MD5 calculation), I can not find any information or signs of existence from either the scheduling or batch functions listed on the website here. Reading the help file and the website does not indicate how to use these features at all from what I can find either.

Final Verdict

While this application does find encrypted files that it has been built to find, it does not unfortunately find all encrypted files as stated in the description. A basic program, if you for some reason think you’ve lost your password-protected files on your system, this may be a fine tool for finding them once. As for paying $195.00 for this title; I would not be able to recommend or this title for this price to anyone unfortunately; The scheduling and batching functionality seems to be hidden (possibly command-line?) or non-existent with no help locating these features, and in reality it does not find all encrypted files, and is really too simple of an application for this price. If you need the functionality, I’d recommend trying their Free version instead of paying $195.00 for so little more.

Posted by BladedThoth on Monday, December 03, 2007