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I have a few zip files from a long time ago but they are encrypted and I don't know the passwords. I have the unencrypted, uncompressed file that is in one of them. With this pair, I am trying to recover the password I used (as I think it's the same for all of them).

I've looked into pkcrack but following tutorials on the internet hasn't been working. Here's my approach:

  • We'll call the encrypted zip files A.zip, B.zip, and so on
  • The file that I have found unzipped is A.txt, and it is contained in A.zip
  • I've recompressed A.txt into A2.zip, without encryption
  • Then I use pkcrack -C A.zip -c A.txt -P A2.zip -p A.txt -a

I get the following warning:

Warning! Plaintext is longer than Ciphertext!

This doesn't make sense. A2.zip (unencrypted) is smaller than A.zip (encrypted).

Additionally, the program runs for like 45 minutes and doesn't end up finding a match. I'm fairly certain I've zipped A2.zip the same way I zipped A.zip.

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Try to use pkcrack with the plaintext file. So you do not compress the .txt file and use pkcrack on encrypted .zip and plainttext (unencrypted) .txt files.

For example:

./pkcrack.exe -c ./encrypted.zip -p ./plaintext.txt

If you wish to pkcrack the unencrypted .zip file with .txt file inside, you must use the same compression program and its options to make the same file and compression options but unencrypted.

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