How to retrieve a password from a Clarion DCT

[Martin]

Hello Colleques

Can you please assist me to figure out the password on my Clarion 6 .dct file. I last worked on this dictionary a couple of years and now can’t remember the password or locate it anywhere. I want to upgrade the file to Clarion 9. As I cannot upload the file here, I would appreciate if you could share your email with me on [email protected] so I can send you the file.

Many thanks
Martin

[RchdR]

Notepad++, with the compare plus addon.
Two identical blank dcts, one with password, one without.

Compare to files in notepad++ and you can see the lines which have sections that are different.

Then using something like https://ghidra-sre.org/ you can reverse engineer the code to workout the password.

There might be other/easier ways to get the password.

You can see some of the table and field definitions in the password protected dct, so you might not even need to have the password…

[Martin]

Thanks RchdR. Let me try this though I will need to figure out how to reverse engineer as well.

[vitesse]

Is there any way to bypass the password to open clarion .dct file?

I tested adding a password to a DCT in 11.1 and viewing the Hex it did Not appear to have been encrypted. You might be able to reverse engineer it using a Hex compare tool to see where the password is stored and a Hex editor to remove it. Create a simpler DCT with 1 file AAA and 1 field BBB. Copy it and add a password XYZ then compare hex.

Also see this thread and Carl’s similar suggestion re comparing files with and without a password.

[Martin]

Thanks all for the guidance received.

After struggling a bit trying to workout the password using Ghidra, I tried something else. After realizing the dct was created using Clarion 6 (because Clarion 9 I’m using was creating the conversion backup file for the dct with a .6dct extension), I installed this IDE onto a machine that supports this version and I was able to open the file using the same password that was being rejected by Clarion 9. Apparently the password I was using was correct, but for some reason C9 was throwing an error when trying to convert the dct. So I removed the password in C6 and then C9 was able to convert the file.