Are there any apps like this for Windows or Mac?

Eschguy

I'm not sure why the story says Linux-only; I had no problems compiling and running this on a Mac. You just need to have libxml2 installed.

Aubin

I've always used the Passware kit from [www.lostpassword.com]

It works great and uses a combination of dictionary and brute force attacks and the complete kit handles many different file types.

However, as with all brute force attacks, it can take a long time and unfortunately it's not freeware.

doctorj

VizionQuest

@VizionQuest

If you are comfortable with compiling from source, start a new command-line project in Xcode. Make sure you add /usr/include/libxml2 to the header search path for your newly created project and libxml2.x.dylib to Target -> Link Binary With Library.

sentin3l

Does anyone fancy doing a very quick walkthrough on how to compile this for OS X? I'm fine doing this on Linux, but XCode is somewhat 'Alien' to me. However, I'm a fairly quick learner.

Thanks in advance.

Jason_H

Not to burst anyone's bubble, but this is in no way a finished product. In fact

It's at version 0.2
Has a single developer
Last update was in 10/2007

In fact, a quick Google search reveals ZipCracker, another Linux zip cracker (although this one's 7 year's old). My "beef" with projects like this is that they inevitably get abandoned. It starts as a side project for a developer and gets dropped when he loses interest.

Then again, this is Open Source.

If the core of his app does what it's supposed to, I might contribute some code to polish it off.

umassdood

For Mac users I worked it out. First you need XCode installed along with the Unix development option which includes the CLI tools.

Download and extract rarcrack to your home folder, then open a terminal and type:

cd rarcrack-0.2/
sudo make && make install

Now it should be installed into /usr/bin/

Next is to test the app. You'll find some test files in the rarcrack folder you extracted earlier to your home folder. Type in:

rarcrack /users/yourname/rarcrack-0.2/test.rar --type rar

Now the app will start to crack the rar.

Hope this helps.

Jason_H

@umassdood:

Brute forcing is a quite simple task, I don't think that it will have to be updated constantly, if there are no bugs and it's working well, it makes sense that it hasn't been updated in 6mos.

Though if your going to modify it, being able to distribute the computing over a few computers would be a nice addition.

Will

First I tried this on a linux box, and it worked fine. Cracked the test.rar in a few minutes, password was "100".

I carried out the same command line make version above it didn't find the password in the 3 character tries. It was also going MUCH faster.

I noticed on the linux box that while it was cracking, it seemed to be just calling unrar with different passwords. unrar was installed on my linux box, but not on my mac (hence the speed increase - doing nothing is faster)

I downloaded UnRarX (www.unrarx.com) pulled out the unrar binary (its in UnRarX.app\Contents\Resources) into my path, then cranked it up again. I immediately started seeing fewer pass/sec (by an order of magnatude) and it worked.

Now, I'm assuming the same goes for 7zip and unzip. It appears the password for all the test ones are 100, so if your system doesn't find that in a few minutes, or before it starts trying 4 characters, its not working.

Also, between runs, while you are checking to see if its working you might want to nuke the .xml file it generates. Its smart in that it resumes where it left off, but if that is beyond the password of '100' the you'll never find the password.

cparker

@Aubin: Care to share it with us? :)

eleazar

@cparker: Thanks for that. I didn't have unrar installed either.

Iain Cheyne