Secure Microsoft Access Passwords and Encryption in Access 2007

Hello Microsoft Access fans and skeptics. In this article, I am going to describe how you can improve on what already is a very significant security improvement in Access 2007, database encryption. The technical research for this article was provided by Wayne Phillips from everythingaccess.com.

Microsoft Access 2007 introduced a new file format for storing Access database information. This file format can be identified by any file that ends with .ACCDB. Whilst Microsoft Access 2007 still supports the file type of .MDB, the future of Access is going to be built around the .ACCDB format.

One of the most significant changes with the .ACCDB format is a new method of encryption that is based around the database password. This change is a very significant security improvement because encrypted ACCDB databases are (in theory) strong enough that they can only be cracked using very computer intensive brute-force password recovery. Of course, as with all security, if lots of people do things the same way the risk is far higher that someone will work out how to breach the security. This definitely will apply to encrypting an Access 2007 database because the default encryption algorithm used is RC4 with a 40-bit key, one that is not as strong as it could be. In this article I am going to show you how to make your password encrypted database more secure than the standard ACCDB encryption.