How to Recover RAR, 7z and ZIP Password with RarCrack in Linux
RarCrack is a program that uses brute force algorithm to find and recover the correct password for compressed archive in .rar (WinRAR), .7z (7-Zip) and .zip (WinZip) format in any POSIX compatible operating system. As such, RarCrack is useful when you have forgotten or lost the password for the compressed archive package in the supported format. To make bruteforce password breaking faster, RarCrack supports specifying a selection of characters and digits to be used in password generations in order to crack the password.
The guide below is a brief explanation on how to use RarCrack to recover and retrieve back the password for .rar, .7z or .zip files. Note that RarCrack requires glibc 2.4, pthreads and libxml2 libraries in order to work. Use rpm, pkg_add, apt-get and other commands to install the dependencies if it’s not installed yet.
- Download RarCrack by using the one of the following commands (just the difference of downloading mirror) in terminal:
wget http://superb-east.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/rarcrack/rarcrack-0.2.tar.bz2
wget http://kent.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/rarcrack/rarcrack-0.2.tar.bz2
wget http://nchc.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/rarcrack/rarcrack-0.2.tar.bz2 - Extract the RarCrack archive:
tar -xjf rarcrack-0.2.tar.bz2
- Change directory into the extracted RarCrack folder:
cd rarcrack-0.2
- Install the RarCrack with the following command:
make
sudo make install (so simply make install if already login as root) - To crack or break the RAR, 7z or ZIP file Password, use the following syntax:
rarcrack encrypted_archive.ext [--threads thread_num] [--type rar|zip|7z]
The switch in [] is optional. RarCrack can autodetect the archive type, so the –type parameter only require if auto-detection of file type is wrong. And by default, RarCrack launches two cracking threads if no thread number is specified.
For example,
rarcrack example.rar
rarcrack forgetpassword.zip - After starting the process to break and crack the password, RarCrack will print and save the current status of cracking to a XML status file. Any valid good password to open the archive, if found, will be printed as good_password variable. An example of the XML file is as follow:
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<rarcrack>
<abc>0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ</abc>
<current>uU</current>
<good_password></good_password>
</rarcrack>Tip: If you can barely remember the password but pretty confident that only certain characters or digits are used, modify the “abc” character set to include those characters or numbers only. On first use, run the RarCrack to generate the XML status file, then edit then file and rerun the RarCrack again.
To unlock a protected or locked RAR archive, use WinRAR Unlock instead.
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Entries (RSS)
May 21st, 2009 07:29
shankar & Antispam are complete imbeciles. Have you seen the source code? It’s completely innocuous apart from being a rudimentary brute-forcing utility. Seriously, get your collective heads out of your arses!
March 2nd, 2009 03:53
rarcrack and several other linux programs work great to recover lost archive passwords. For those saying “Bullshit” are probably those who either have not tried it, or tried it and gave up after a few minutes. These programs attempt to use as many combinations of letters and number as possible so for an 8 char. password using upper/lower case letters and numbers you could spend years trying to recover it. Other then that rarcrack works perfect for password recovery, especially when its for someone who can’t remember which dictionary based word they used.
January 30th, 2009 23:36
No Bullshit. It doesn’t claim to break the protection it uses bruteforce (shall I google that for you?) to which NO crypto-algorhythm is safe against, since it emulates a user typing in ALL passwords possible. If you implement a time penalty or limit of tries, thats another matter, but has nothing to do with the crypto-algorhythm.
January 23rd, 2009 02:49
Bullshit. There’s no such thing as ‘break rar/zip passwords’.
Bunch of idiots. You’re all spending the time of everyone.
January 7th, 2009 02:21
I tried this in Ubuntu 8.04, didn’t work. It halted on the first ‘make’.
January 6th, 2009 09:21
WinRAR unlock is a spyware stealing credit card information. This spyware doesnot detected even in VirusTotal, but after installation, the spyware springs up. beware. Kasperky detected that way.
January 6th, 2009 02:02
[...] To recover and break the password of RAR in Linux, use RarCrack. [...]