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How can we check any file is password protect or not in c#

What I have tried:

We tried but we need to specify file type but we want to check any file whether excel csv word or any file
Posted
Updated 25-May-23 3:09am
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PIEBALDconsult 25-May-23 8:34am    
Don't waste your time, it's not worth the effort. Reduce your scope.
Most files, especially text files (including CSV, XML, and JSON), cannot be password protected.
If someone wants to protect files, generally they will Zip them up with a password. So look at Zip files as a first step.
Modern Word (DOCX) and Excel (XLSX) files are really just Zip files containing XML files, so they fall into that category as well.
That should cover nearly everything you need.
Other than that, I can think of database files, but I doubt you need to check those, even if it's possible.

You can't: password protected data is encrypted (or you wouldn't need a password to access it) and without the correct password it just looks like random numbers - which is exactly what a random data file can look like. Yes, you can sometimes say "this is a text file" and maybe from that say "oh, it's CSV data" or "it's JSON" - but even text files can look like random data is they are written in Cyrillic, Korean, Chinese, Arabic, ... the list goes on. And binary data like EXE files, DLLs, images, music, video can look pretty random as well, unless you understand the actual data format or each of them (and there are probably dozens of different types of each). Then you get to proprietary data formats, where the format detail may not even be published so it just looks like random data and may or may not be encrypted.

To make matters worse, Excel and Word not only support password protection, but have modern compressed XML based files (which look pretty random to the casual eye even if unprotected) but also support the older, proprietary binary formats as well!

I'd rethink what you are trying to achieve so you can either find another way to get there, or to limit the scope of what you need to detect - this is probably not going to be a success in it's current form.
 
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Member 15418280 25-May-23 2:54am    
we need only to check whether any file is password or not.
OriginalGriff 25-May-23 3:11am    
Did you read anything I said?

Read it again: you can't tell encrypted data from "random data" without having the password and knowing the algorithm used for encryption.

For example, is this encrypted: "48656C6C6F20576F726C6421"?
What about this: "tujYyqdeV+yuwRwyILNvpA=="?
Or this: "2BDB6D0CC92F9DA58AA16AA3DC48B9A9"
How can you tell?
You can't!

The file doesn't know if it is password protected. It is literally ONLY data. The application that uses that file is the only thing that would possibly know if the file it's using is password "protected", which is really just encrypted. There is no standard flag anywhere that says the file is "protected". To YOUR application, the data is just a bunch of meaningless bytes.
 
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I dont think a generic solution exists. But one approach which might get you partway there is to try to open the file in your code, using its application, derived from the file type suffix . EG trying to open a .DOC or .DOCX with Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.

If you can't open it, then it MIGHT be password protected. You would need to develop a solution for each file type you want to scan

try
{
Application wordApp = new Application();
wordApp.DisplayAlerts = Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word.WdAlertLevel.wdAlertsNone;

Document doc = wordApp.Documents.Open(ref Path, ref nullobj, ref nullobj, ref nullobj, ref passobj, ref nullobj, ref nullobj, ref nullobj, ref nullobj, ref nullobj, ref nullobj, ref nullobj, ref nullobj, ref nullobj, ref nullobj, ref nullobj);
wordApp.Quit(false);
}
Catch (Exception e)
{
// Signal that you cant open the file
}
 
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Dave Kreskowiak 7-Sep-23 9:26am    
Completely impractical and doesn't work for "any file" as the OP wanted.

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