When con­nect­ing to a new project via FTP I will occa­sion­ally come across .STE (Dreamweaver Site File) files being used as a means to store FTP user­name and pass­word infor­ma­tion. The FTP pass­word is always encrypted in these files. This causes prob­lems because I do not use Dreamweaver to build web­sites. Even worse, what if I were some­one else that did not own a copy of Dreamweaver?

If you come across a legacy site that uses an .STE file to pro­vide FTP infor­ma­tion it can be dif­fi­cult to get that infor­ma­tion into another program.

Process

Here is the process I went through to extract the pass­word from a .STE file:

1. Open the .STE with a plain text edi­tor. You will see an XML document.
2. You will see that the &ls;remoteinfo> tag has many attrib­utes. Find the pw=”” attribute and copy it’s con­tents to the clipboard.
3. Go to http://www.moredw.com/getPW.php and click on the “Get FTP Pass­word online” towards the bot­tom of the page. This will launch a popup window.
4. Use the WebApp here to de-crypt the password.

That’s it, you’ve de-crypted the FTP pass­word, your free now.

Resources

• File Exten­sion .STE Details
• Dreamweaver 8 Help Files
• De-crypting a Dreamweaver .STE Password