mfontana@eniac.seas.upenn.edu (Mark A Fontana) (06/04/91)
Well, I'm stupid. I encrypted some personal files in a .ZIP before leaving on a trip. Two weeks later, I've forgotten the key (thought I would remember it- Murphy's Law). So, is there any little utility or trick to recover the archive, or should I keep guessing? I am using Pkzip 1.1 with the USA encryption. Mark
rdippold@cancun.qualcomm.com (Ron Dippold) (06/05/91)
In article <44102@netnews.upenn.edu> mfontana@eniac.seas.upenn.edu (Mark A Fontana) writes: > >Well, I'm stupid. I encrypted some personal files in a .ZIP before leaving >on a trip. Two weeks later, I've forgotten the key (thought I would >remember it- Murphy's Law). > >So, is there any little utility or trick to recover the archive, or >should I keep guessing? I am using Pkzip 1.1 with the USA encryption. The best place for this is comp.compression. -- Standard disclaimer applies, you legalistic hacks. | Ron Dippold
mig@cunixb.cc.columbia.edu (Meir) (06/05/91)
In article <44102@netnews.upenn.edu> mfontana@eniac.seas.upenn.edu (Mark A Fontana) writes: > >Well, I'm stupid. I encrypted some personal files in a .ZIP before leaving >on a trip. Two weeks later, I've forgotten the key (thought I would >remember it- Murphy's Law). > >So, is there any little utility or trick to recover the archive, or >should I keep guessing? I am using Pkzip 1.1 with the USA encryption. Keep guessing! And good luck! Next time, write it down or, better still, don't use encryption! * * * * * * * ======================= Meir Green * * * * * * * * ======================= mig@cunixb.cc.columbia.edu * * * * * * * ======================= meir@msb.com
barnett@rex.cs.tulane.edu (Karey Barnett) (06/05/91)
In article <44102@netnews.upenn.edu> mfontana@eniac.seas.upenn.edu (Mark A Fontana) writes: > >Well, I'm stupid. I encrypted some personal files in a .ZIP before leaving >on a trip. Two weeks later, I've forgotten the key (thought I would >remember it- Murphy's Law). > >So, is there any little utility or trick to recover the archive, or >should I keep guessing? I am using Pkzip 1.1 with the USA encryption. > > As an intense solution, you might want to write a program to generate the password by using all of the different, possible combinations of ASCII characters in sequence. To cut down on the possible combinations, you can limit the character search to the one's that you very often use, in addition to setting a maximum strength length. For example, if there is a chance that you used a password <= 10 characters in length, specify the maximum length to 10. This would produce 256 to the exponent of 10 different, possible combinations of passwords, with only one (of course), the correct one. (Using all of the 256 ASCII characters). But, if you limit the characters to search to perhaps numbers and alphabets (both capital and lower-cased), if you used them, then this will have 62 (10 numbers + 26 lower case +26 upper case) to the exponent of 10 possible combinations. Assuming only lower-cased letters in the password, then there are 26 to exponent of 10 possible passwords... Another factor to the solution is incorporating the calculated password with pkunzip. You might need to do an exec of pkunzip with the password within your program, or come up with a clever way using a batch file that takes in command line parameters to run pkunzip. Thus, you have my suggestion, which as I said before, is intense.
ed@odi.com (Ed Schwalenberg) (06/05/91)
In article <7765@rex.cs.tulane.edu> barnett@rex.cs.tulane.edu (Karey Barnett) writes:
Assuming only lower-cased letters in the password, then there
are 26 to exponent of 10 possible passwords...
Great. That's only 141167095653376 passwords. Testing one every millisecond
will only take 4,473 years.
Thus, you have my suggestion, which as I said before, is intense.
Very.