can hashcat help a map geek?
#1
i'm a bit of a map geek and came across a commercial product that provides raster (rendered image) nautilcal-map data (aka "charts") for the whole world.  

It uses symmetric cryptography for copy protection and was designed 25 years ago (DES? 3DES? Blowfish? AES wasn't around yet).  Access to an individual chart is via a "chart-permit" string, which is basically a chart-decryption key, encrypted to your specific installation of a compatible map-viewing app.  See section 4 for a similar scheme..  The protection scheme I'm referring to however has a shorter key lengths than the linked similar system, and may not be using the same algo.

Is this something that hashcat can be helpful with, for cracking (brute-forcing) valid chart-permit strings? Or to put more simply, can i use hashcat to recover the encryption key given the cipher text, as if it was a password ?

Also if anyone has experience with reverse engineering symmetric cryptography and checksums at the x86 assembly level that i can collab with, please reach out to me in private!
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