NAME
fcrackzip - a Free/Fast Zip Password Cracker
SYNOPSIS
fcrackzip [-bDBchVvplum2] [--brute-force] [--dictionary] [--benchmark]
[--charset characterset] [--help] [--validate] [--verbose]
[--init-password string/path] [--length min-max] [--use-unzip]
[--method name] [--modulo r/m] file...
DESCRIPTION
fcrackzip searches each zipfile given for encrypted files and tries to
guess the password. All files must be encrypted with the same password,
the more files you provide, the better.
OPTIONS
-h, --help
Prints the version number and (hopefully) some helpful insights.
-v, --verbose
Each -v makes the program more verbose.
-b, --brute-force
Select brute force mode. This tries all possible combinations of
the letters you specify.
-D, --dictionary
Select dictionary mode. In this mode, fcrackzip will read
passwords from a file, which must contain one password per line
and should be alphabetically sorted (e.g. using sort(1)).
-c, --charset characterset-specification
Select the characters to use in brute-force cracking. Must be
one of
a include all lowercase characters [a-z]
A include all uppercase characters [A-Z]
1 include the digits [0-9]
! include [!:$%&/()=?{[]}+*~#]
: the following characters upto the end of the spe-
cification string are included in the character set.
This way you can include any character except binary
null (at least under unix).
For example, a1:$% selects lowercase characters, digits and the
dollar and percent signs.
-p, --init-password string
Set initial (starting) password for brute-force searching to
string, or use the file with the name string to supply passwords
for dictionary searching.
-l, --length min[-max]
Use an initial password of length min, and check all passwords
upto passwords of length max (including). You can omit the max
parameter.
-u, --use-unzip
Try to decompress the first file by calling unzip with the
guessed password. This weeds out false positives when not enough
files have been given.
-m, --method name
Use method number "name" instead of the default cracking method.
The switch --help will print a list of available methods. Use
--benchmark to see which method does perform best on your
machine. The name can also be the number of the method to use.
-2, --modulo r/m
Calculate only r/m of the password. Not yet supported.
-B, --benchmark
Make a small benchmark, the output is nearly meaningless.
-V, --validate
Make some basic checks wether the cracker works.
ZIP PASSWORD BASICS
Have you ever mis-typed a password for unzip? Unzip reacted pretty fast
with ´incorrect password´, without decrypting the whole file. While the
encryption algorithm used by zip is relatively secure, PK made cracking
easy by providing hooks for very fast password-checking, directly in
the zip file. Understanding these is crucial to zip password cracking:
For each password that is tried, the first twelve bytes of the file are
decrypted. Depending on the version of zip used to encrypt the file
(more on that later), the first ten or eleven bytes are random,
followed by one or two bytes whose values are stored elsewhere in the
zip file, i.e. are known beforehand. If these last bytes don’t have the
correct (known) value, the password is definitely wrong. If the bytes
are correct, the password might be correct, but the only method to find
out is to unzip the file and compare the uncompressed length and crc´s.
Earlier versions of pkzip (1.xx) (and, incidentally, many zip clones
for other operating systems!) stored two known bytes. Thus the error
rate was roughly 1/2^16 = 0.01%. PKWARE ´improved´ (interesting what
industry calls improved) the security of their format by only including
one byte, so the possibility of false passwords is now raised to 0.4%.
Unfortunately, there is no real way to distinguish one byte from two
byte formats, so we have to be conservative.
BRUTE FORCE MODE
By default, brute force starts at the given starting password, and
successively tries all combinations until they are exhausted, printing
all passwords that it detects, together with a rough correctness
indicator.
The starting password given by the -p switch determines the length.
fcrackzip will not currently increase the password length
automatically, unless the -l switch is used.
DICTIONARY MODE
This mode is similar to brute force mode, but instead of generating
passwords using a given set of characters and a length, the passwords
will be read from a file that you have to specify using the -p switch.
CP MASK
A CP mask is a method to obscure images or parts of images using a
password. These obscured images can be restored even when saved as
JPEG files. In most of these files the password is actually hidden and
can be decoded easily (using one of the many available viewer and
masking programs, e.g. xv). If you convert the image the password,
however, is lost. The cpmask crack method can be used to brute-force
these images. Instead of a zip file you supply the obscured part (and
nothing else) of the image in the PPM-Image Format (xv and other
viewers can easily do this).
The cpmask method can only cope with password composed of uppercase
letters, so be sure to supply the --charset A or equivalent option,
together with a suitable initialization password.
EXAMPLES
fcrackzip -c a -p aaaaaa sample.zip
checks the encrypted files in sample.zip for all lowercase 6
character passwords (aaaaaa ... abaaba ... ghfgrg ... zzzzzz).
fcrackzip --method cpmask --charset A --init AAAA test.ppm
checks the obscured image test.ppm for all four character
passwords.
fcrackzip -D -p passwords.txt sample.zip
check for every password listed in the file passwords.txt.
PERFORMANCE
fzc, which seems to be widely used as a fast password cracker, claims
to make 204570 checks per second on my machine (measured under plain
dos w/o memory manager).
fcrackzip, being written in C and not in assembler, naturally is
slower. Measured on a slightly loaded unix (same machine), it´s 12
percent slower (the compiler used was pgcc, from
http://www.gcc.ml.org/).
To remedy this a bit, I converted small parts of the encryption core to
x86 assembler (it will still compile on non x86 machines), and now it´s
about 4-12 percent faster than fzc (again, the fcrackzip performance
was measured under a multitasking os, so there are inevitably some
meaurement errors), so there shouldn’t be a tempting reason to switch
to other programs.
Further improvements are definitely possible: fzc took 4 years to get
into shape, while fcrackzip was hacked together in under 10 hours. And
not to forget you have the source, while other programs (like fzc),
even come as an encrypted .exe file (maybe because their programmers
are afraid of other people could having a look at their lack of
programming skills? nobody knows...)
RATIONALE
The reason I wrote fcrackzip was NOT to have the fastest zip cracker
available, but to provide a portable, free (thus extensible), but still
fast zip password cracker. I was really pissed of with that dumb,
nonextendable zipcrackers that were either slow, were too limited, or
wouldn’t run in the background (say, under unix). (And you can’t run
them on your superfast 600Mhz Alpha).
BUGS
No automatic unzip checking.
Stop/resume facility is missing.
Should be able to distinguish between files with 16 bit stored CRC´s
and 8 bit stored CRC´s.
The benchmark does not work on all systems.
It’s still early alpha.
Method "cpmask" only accepts ppms.
Could be faster.
AUTHOR
fcrackzip was written by Marc Lehmann <pcg@goof.com>. The main
fcrackzip page is at http://www.goof.com/pcg/marc/fcrackzip.html)
Free/Fast Zip Password Cracker