How to open password protected RAR file without password?

First of all, sorry for the title; you cannot extract a password protected RAR file without its password. If that was possible there was no need for passwords and encryptions in the first place. It would be lying if someone told you that RAR password recovery was possible instantly but sadly there are many sites spreading fake tutorials. One such tutorial asks the user to open the encrypted RAR file in a text editor and remove the password from there. How ridiculous! It would have been possible with a hex editor if the RAR stores the password as a clear text in the file itself but they do not.

Anyways we are lucky that we have many tools to help us recover lost or forgotten passwords and in this article, we will go through some of these known softwares. These are the same tools that police and forensic people use, so again, there is no shortcut to bypass the password.

I’ll try my best to educate you on the recovery process, the best tools (including some free ones), and services for a successful password recovery. So please go through the entire article.

Basics of different password recovery techniques

Before we answer the age-old question on how to extract RAR file without password, there are three different recovery options that you should know about. Choosing the right method is the key to a fast & successful unlock and therefore it is very important to know what these different attack modes are. They are as follows:

• Brute-force Attack: This method tries all the possible combinations of characters. As a result, brute force attacks are very slow and require powerful computers to speed up the process. Assume your password is 5 characters long and that you have no idea of its features (i.e whether it contains uppercase, digits,..), this makes the total combinations to a minimum of 7,820,126,495. I said minimum because this calculation assumes we are dealing with the English character set alone! With every extra character in the password, the total number of possible combinations increases exponentially.
  
• Brute-force with Mask Attack: If you know something about the password such as its length, character set, prefix, suffix, etc. then you can also bring down the total search space exponentially; how cool is that! To take advantage of this you should need a RAR password recoverer that has this feature.
  
• Dictionary Attack: This type of technique is used when you are sure that the password is from a given set of words, let’s say one from the English words. It doesn’t necessarily have to be English though, you can supply any wordlist as a text file in most softwares. Large dictionary files can also be found online.

If every possible password is tried, sooner or later yours will be found.

The question is: Will that be too soon . . . or enough later?

grc.com/haystack.htm – [Check out their brute force calculator]

Important requirements for fast and successful password retrieval

• Recollect as many features you remember about the password such as its length, casing, letter combinations, language, etc.
• A new powerful CPU
• A modern GPU can improve the speed of recovery by 10-20 times.
• A RAR password recovery software that can make use of the above features

The Best RAR password recovery softwares & services

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Online Password Recovery Services

Pay only if the password is recovered.

A RAR password recovery software cannot guarantee successful decryption (theoretically possible but practically no), so if you don’t want to pay for such software unless decryption is guaranteed then it’s better to make use of online recovery services. One such company is password-online. Just upload your encrypted RAR file on their website and wait for them to crack it. Once the RAR is decrypted, they will present the proof, after which you can pay their fees of just 10 Euros to get the password. Password-online has large server farms so you can expect to recover the password sooner than if you attempted to recover it yourself.

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Freeware utilities for RAR password recovery

cRARk

An amazing utility for people who are comfortable using terminal. Supported on Windows, Mac and Linux.

cRARk is a free command-line software for RAR password cracking! It’s a well-maintained project and offers CUDA & OpenCL support, which can tremendously speed up the process. So if you are rocking a decent graphics card and processor, you should be able to crack a password of under 6 characters in a day as opposed to weeks and months. I tested the tool, with and without the GPU engine and the results are astonishing. Without the GPU engine, it was just above 500 passwords/ second and with GPU the speed was over a whooping 25,000 password/ second! That’s even more than what I have achieved with Passware Kit.

With cRARk you can define all you know about the password using a Password Definition Language(PDL) in a .def file. This is very similar to regular expressions so if you already have experience with regex then there will no troubles, plus they have several examples on their website.

How to use cRARk in Windows?

First download the latest version of cRARk and extract the folder to your desktop.

Now open up Notepad or any text editor to create the PDL. A sample password definition that brute forces passwords containing alphabets and numbers is shown below. Save the file as “password.def” to the cRARk folder which you just extracted.

##
[$a $A $1] *

## For more examples of PDL visit http://www.crark.net/cRARk.html#44

Next, open your Windows terminal or CMD and use the cd command to navigate to the cRARk folder which you just extracted. Then run cRARk with the following command. Replace “..\treasure.rar” with the path of your encrypted file.

.\cRARk.exe -p'password.def' ..\treasure.rar

There are additional flags that you can supply, like min & max length, debug mode, etc. Learn more about it on cRARk’s website.

One of the limitations with cRARk is the lack of multi CPU/GPU support but you can overcome that by using another software known as Parallel Password Recovery which also makes use of PDL files. Additionally, Parallel Password Recovery can also take advantage of multiple computers using the distributed decryption feature. I have tested this software and it works great!

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John the Ripper

John the Ripper is a free, open-source, command-line program for password security auditing and recovery. It is available on macOS, Linux, and Windows. JR is incredibly versatile and can crack anything you throw at it including archive files (ZIP, RAR), document files (PDF, Office, etc), filesystems, web apps, and more. You can use JR for brute force or dictionary attack.

To get started, download John the Ripper and extract the archive to your desktop. Now fire up CMD or the new terminal in Windows and cd to the root folder of JR and then to the “run” folder. Next, execute the following commands.

rar2john.exe ..\..\treasure2.rar > hash.txt

Replace “..\..\treasure2.rar” with the path of your encrypted RAR file. The “hash.txt” will now be generated in the “run” folder. The next step is to decrypt the hash to retrieve the password.

john.exe ..\..\treasure.rar hash.txt

john.exe --format=rar --wordlist password.lst hash.txt

FAQ

Have you tried any of these? Let me know your thoughts & experiences with password protected RAR decryption in the comments below.

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