Is there any way to bypass a password on an encrypted RAR file?

Question

I recently had to format my computer and i emailed an rar that i archived and set a password for it has some personal info in it and i forgot what the password was i know it was like 15 characters long and all numbers i already bought a rar password revovery program but the bruteforce attack for a password that long would take like 1100 years or some rediculous amount of time like that so if there is a way to bypass the pasword i used winRAR to archive it in case you need to know it would be very much appreciated

Answer 1

i think there is one because my friends have sneak in my password portected rar file.. but i don't know it yet...

Answer 2

There is no way to bypass the password, if there were that would kind of defeat the purpose of password protecting it in the first place.

If you know the password was all numbers you should be able to limit your brute force attack to numeric only (as opposed to alphanumeric) which will cut down on the time it should take. Just start it going and let it sit.

Granted, you've still got 10^15 possible combinations for a fifteen character long numeric only password, but that's a lot fewer than the 36^15 possible combinations for an alphanumeric password (a fifteen character alphanumeric password has two hundred twenty one million times the number of possible permutations when compared to a fifteen character numeric password, it shouldn't take more than a few hours to brute force it).

Next time just don't forget what you set the password to.

Answer 3

It's not encrypted, it is just password protected... there is a huge difference...
if it were truly encrypted you would have little chance of anything working.

As for bypassing the password.. try strings 2.40 available from microsoft's website:
www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/Miscellaneous/Strings.mspx

Good Luck

Answer 4

I usually use passware to crack it but you have to buy the software. You can use dictionary attack or bruce attack.
It depends on how long the password he use.

Answer 5

so what happened? I need closure