[comp.sys.ibm.pc.misc] Any way to recover encrypted .zip?

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

galt@baby.dsd.es.com (Greg Alt - Perp) (06/06/91)

In article <1991Jun5.145446.4414@odi.com>, ed@odi.com (Ed Schwalenberg) writes:
> 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.


Or, if you are sure that the password is a an actual word, you could download
a dictionary file, and try all the words until it works...  If you use the 
encription method, you might be able to write a C program to attempt this...
(this would only require ~30,000 attempts)
       Greg