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I know this would be less fun, but given that the key space was only 36^4, why not just run the actual decryption functionality in QText? Like, even if it takes 1 second to decrypt, spin up 32 cores and wait a day. They allude to the idea that checking the key derivation is faster, but I wonder by how much.

(of course, it’s still interesting to read about 90s encryption, so I appreciate that they did it the fun way)

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I assume the hard part would have been automating this or extracting the key derivation and check code out of QText so you can run it separately in a loop.

I'm pretty sure you can automate DOSBox input, but if you're more comfortable with reversing algorithms than writing reliable UI automation script then what they did isn't necessarily an overkill.

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