How to crack WinRAR password?

there are a number of different applications, some free but most for a small price, to crack document passwords.

Something to keep in mind though, is that a RAR file uses substantially more complicated encryption type by default, such as AES-256. Whereas a zip file, only in recent years, even has actual encryption on their files. Zip 1.0 ‘encryption’ was pretty much just a flag set saying not to open unless they put in a password. This was known as a vulnerability of the worst kind. You could just instantly unlock it with a tiny free application. Now it’s a bit more complicated, because depending on what you use to create a zip file, you can set all sorts of encryption options if you want, even though the defaults are fairly weak encryption.

A RAR file generally uses AES-256 encryption by default, and allows for any number of mind numbing alterations to it. Furthermore, any vulnerabilities found in RAR encryption over the years have been corrected by an active team, where as zip files were never meant to be secure.

Here is a breakdown of a popular multi-document cracking software called Passware.

This first image is it cracking a default encrypted .zip file. Unless you have an unencrypted copy of a file inside of the zip file for reference, know part of the password, or know the password criteria (8 characters long, upper/lower case, symbols, etc…), then your only hope is to brute force it. That means trying every possible combination until it finds the right one.

See over to the left. It shows my PC crunching a bit over 7 million possible passwords a second. That’s not even that good. I could of course specify options if I knew them and shorten the time it takes to try every single combination, but for the sake of testing here I didn’t. I told it 100% brute force xieve based hybrid attack. That means it technically will try every word in the dictionary, plus stacked words, with a basic ‘fudge factor’ where it may replace the letter L with a 1, etc.., then try all the words in the dictionary with numbers and symbols tacked onto the end.

It found my 10 digital upper/lowercase and number password in three and a half minutes.

Now take a look at an AES-256 encrypted file under the same general “I don’t know anything about the password” options.

Eleven thousand passwords per second. The more complicated encryption means you literally have to spend 100x more computing cycles to check the same password as you would with a more basic encryption. It’s going to take 10 minutes just to try the brute force of every possible combination of passwords that are up to 4 digits long.

The longer the password is, the exponentially longer time it will take to crack. With basic encryption types, any password over 10 characters and you might as well not bother. You have to factor in password types. Just adding uppercase set of passwords to crack to a lowercase set doesn’t just double the possibilities, but an Nth number of possibilities, as any digit could be upper or lowercase. Adding numbers and symbols to a password, add additional complexities. Not just the 26 letters on a US keyboard, but now dozens more, make the possible number of passwords almost unimaginable, let alone crack-able if you avoid using real words that it can reference. The program will gladly try it’s best, and will also gladly tell you a time-frame of some obscene length of time like 500 years.

So to answer your question, feel free to take a shot with one of the applications if you want, or use a cracking service (which uses similar software but on more powerful parallel processing computers). You might get lucky and it’s a simple password.

P.S. If you downloaded a movie/book/software off of an illegal website and it is RAR password protected and instructs you to go to some website and complete an offer to get the password. Give up. There is no password, the file is a fake, and the password is so long you will never crack it anyway. It’s a popular scam that uses RAR files specifically because there are no instant unlock vulnerabilities like with older zip files.