Cryptographer says defect leaves users vulnerable.
Cryptography expert Phil Zimmermann says he believes a flaw recently discovered in Microsoft Office's Word and Excel encryption is serious and warrants immediate attention.
"I think this is a serious flaw--it is highly exploitable. It is not a theoretical attack," says Zimmermann, referring to a flaw in Microsoft's use of RC4 document encryption unearthed recently by a researcher in Singapore.
Zimmermann is best known as the creator of Pretty Good Privacy, a desktop encryption program so powerful that U.S. authorities attempted to have its distribution stopped and Zimmermann imprisoned for writing it. The case was abandoned in 1996.
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