How to crack password protected rar and 7z files on GNU / Linux

Friday, 7th October 2011

break / crack password protected rar, zip archives on Linux and FreeBSD rarcrcack

RarCrack is able to crack rar and 7z archive files protected by password on Linux.
The program is currently at release version 0.2, so its far from perfection, but at least it can break rars.

RarCrack is currently installable on most Linux distributions only from source, to install on a random Linux distro, download and make && make install . RarCrack’s official site is here, I’ve mirrored the current version of RarCrack for download here . To install rarcrack from source using the mirrored version:

linux:~# wget https://www.pc-freak.net/files/rarcrack-0.2.tar.bz2
...
linux:~# tar -jxvvf rarcrack-0.2.tar.bz2
linux:~# cd rarcrack-0.2
linux:~/rarcrack-0.2# make
...
linux:~/rarcrack-0.2# make install
...

On FreeBSD, rarcrack is available and installable via the ports tree, to install on FreeBSD:

freebsd# cd /usr/ports/security/rarcrack
freebsd# make && make install
...

To use RarCrack to crack rar, zip or 7z archive file:

freebsd% rarcrack rar_file_protected_with_password.rar --type rar

The argument –type rar is optional, in most archives RarCrack should detect the archive automatically. The –type option could also take the arguments of rar and 7z .

I’ve created a sample rar file protected with password linux_then_and_now.png.rar . The archive linux_then_and_now.png contains a graphic file illustrating the linux growth in use in computers, mobiles and servers. linux_then_and_now.png.rar is protected with the sample password parola

RarCrack also supports threads (a simultaneous instance spawned copies of the program). Using threads speeds up the process of cracking and thus using the –threads is generally a good idea. Hence a good way to use rarcrack with the –threads option is:

freebsd% rarcrack linux_then_and_now.png.rar --threads 8 --type rar
RarCrack! 0.2 by David Zoltan Kedves (kedazo@gmail.com)
INFO: the specified archive type: rar
INFO: cracking linux_then_and_now.png.rar, status file: linux_then_and_now.png.rar.xml
Probing: '0i' [24 pwds/sec]
Probing: '1v' [25 pwds/sec]

RarCrack‘s source archive also comes with three sample archive files (rar, 7z and zip) protected with passwords for the sake of testing the tool.
One downside of RarCrack is its extremely slow in breaking the passwords on my Lenovo notebook – dual core 1.8ghz with 2g ram it was able to brute force only 20-25 passwords per second.
This means cracking a normal password of 6 symbols will take at least 5 hours.
RarCrack is also said to support cracking zip passwords, but my tests to crack password protected zip file did not bring good results and even one of the tests ended with a segmentation fault.

To test how rarcrack performs with password protected zip files and hence compare if it is superior or inferior to fcrackzip, I used the fcrackzip’s sample pass protected zip noradi.zip

hipo@noah:~$ rarcrack --threads 8 noradi.zip --type zip
2 by David Zoltan Kedves (kedazo@gmail.com)
INFO: the specified archive type: zip
INFO: cracking noradi.zip, status file: noradi.zip.xml
Probing: 'hP' [386 pwds/sec]
Probing: 'At' [385 pwds/sec]
Probing: 'ST' [380 pwds/sec]

As you can see in above’s command output, the zip password cracking rate of approximately 380 passwords per second is a bit quicker, but still slower than fcrackzip.

RarCrack seg faults if cracking a pass protected zip is passed on without specifying the –type zip command arguments:

linux:~$ rarcrack --threads 8 noradi.zip
RarCrack! 0.2 by David Zoltan Kedves (kedazo@gmail.com)
Segmentation fault

While talking about cracking protected rar and zip archives with password, its worthy to mention creating a password protected archive with Gnome Desktop on Linux and FreeBSD is very easy.

To create the password protected archive in Gnome graphic environment:

a. Point the cursor to the file you want to archive with password

Gnome pointing file properties drop down menu

b. Press on Other Options and fill in the password in the pwd dialog

Linux protect rar with password on Gnome Desktop

I think as of time of writting, no GUI frontend interface for neither RarCrack or FcrackZip is available. Lets hope some good guy from the community will take the time to write extension for Gnome to allow us to crack rar and zip from a nice GUI interface.

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3 Responses to “How to crack password protected rar and 7z files on GNU / Linux”

  1. admin says:
    Epiphany 2.30.6 Epiphany 2.30.6 Debian GNU/Linux x64 Debian GNU/Linux x64
    Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.2+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0 Safari/531.2+ Debian/squeeze (2.30.6-1) Epiphany/2.30.6

    Something, I forgot to mention about rarcrack is that it doesn’t have support for dictionary word file. This is something vital that hopefully will be added in the upcoming releases.

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  2. Dick says:
    Internet Explorer 7.0 Internet Explorer 7.0 Windows XP Windows XP
    Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; FDM; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729)

    You should be trown in the coop for this kind of crap.
    And humiliated in public!

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  3. Steven P says:
    Firefox 9.0.1 Firefox 9.0.1 Ubuntu Ubuntu
    Mozilla/5.0 (Ubuntu; X11; Linux i686; rv:9.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/9.0.1

    rarcrack is a joke.

    The developer pooched the printf function such that the only way it runs is with the “–type rar” switch (it cannot detect normally), and the password generated is NEVER correct. I created an RAR with a password to see. It NEVER found the password, but dutifully spat out a password and called it good.

    That is a two hour span I’ll never get back.

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