How good is Word's password protection?

Question

I have a password protected MS-Word 2007 file that needs to stay private. How good is Word's protection? If it's not very good, can you suggest a better method for keeping the file protected?

EDIT: my goal is to send the protected file to a recipient (who knows the password). I assume this recipient knows nothing about encryption/decryption, but if I absolutely have to, I'll encrypt the file and painstakingly teach the recipient how to decrypt it.

Answer 1

Judging from the results of a search for "break microsoft word password", it is not so secure. If you really need to keep it secret, then encrypt the file.

Answer 2

You could use 7z to compress and encrypt the file. It uses AES-256 which is the same encryption standard used by the US government.

Another option is to use an email service that offers PKI secured e-mail. You and your recipient would both need accounts.

Answer 3

It's not good, unless you're on the latest office release (Office 2007 or newer)

I suggest you look at GNU Privacy Guard / Gpg4Win or if you're storing the data on a usb flash drive check out TrueCrypt

Answer 4

If you don't trust Word, you could create an encrypted file container using TrueCrypt. There's a good tutorial which explains how to do this.

Answer 5

On older versions of Word, it was like putting a cheap bicycle lock on the handle bars. It was easy to crack, and didn't really make it difficult to read the file. You could open the file in a hex editor, and read most, if not all, of the data fairly easily.

Answer 6

One should prefer methods that were thoroughly examined by mathematicians and computer scientists. It was one of the arguments against accepting Office Open XML document format as an international standard.