SUMMARY: How many times have you decided that you just needed to protect some of your work with a password... and then forgot it? If you're like many, then this is something that can happen from time to time. Jon "Albinus" Albiez takes a look at the Advanced Archive Password Recovery program to see if it has what it takes to help us in our moment of need.
ZIP files have a known vulnerability in that they are susceptible to Plain-text attacks. For instance, if there is an unencrypted file and an encrypted file within the same archive, ARCHPR can compare the two files and generate a series of 3 keys that will (hopefully) reveal your lost password for the encrypted one.
Some passwords can take a long time to process. So wouldn't it be nice to resume scanning from where you left off? With ARCHPR you can - you can set the project to automatically save after a set number of minutes, so if the machine hangs while you are away, simply reboot and you can start scanning again from the last tried password. You can also select the directory and file name of the auto-save file.
Other options are selected under the options tab - you can select whether to make the password recovery a background or real-time process. Other options such as entering your registration key and updating the product can also be found here.
This section is for the advanced whiz-kids out there. The most popular option would probably be to enter in the known start of the file, if you know the hex address. Also, you can choose the mask symbol and if you want to use a WinZip optimised engine.
Down the bottom of the screen is the status window. Anything which is important will be reported here, so you don't have to fiddle around with log files. The top bar allows you to open a partially-completed password recovery, to save one already in progress, to Start a new one, or stop if already in progress. A nice feature I like is the benchmark one. This simply runs a test for 10 seconds against the file and options you have specified - it will report something like what's in the following box:
It will display the number of possible passwords, the estimated time required to process them all, and the average speed in passwords per second. In this case, almost 147 trillion passwords will keep my 1GHz Pentium III munching away for about 9.5 months. The other buttons (Help, About, Quit) are pretty standard, no need to explain there.
Under the top bar, you have two options - to select the file you wish to recover the password from, and the method by which you want to attack the file. Here are the available options:
