Advanced Archive Password Recovery recovers protection passwords or unlocks encrypted ZIP and RAR archives created with all versions of popular archivers. Recover passwords for plain and self-extracting archives created with PKZip and WinZip, RAR and WinRAR automatically or with your assistance. Guaranteed unlocking of archives created with WinZip 8.0 and earlier in under one hour is possible by exploiting an implementation flaw.

Advanced Archive Password Recovery features ultimate compatibility among the various types of archives, knows weaknesses of certain types of protection, and provides best-in-class performance in unlocking all types of archives.
Features and Benefits

    Supports all versions of ZIP/PKZip/WinZip, RAR/WinRAR, as well as ARJ/WinARJ, and ACE/WinACE (1.x)
    Guaranteed recovery of archives in under 1 hour for ZIP archives created with WinZip 8.0 and earlier and containing at least 5 files
    Supports archives over 4 GB and self-extracting archives
    Supports strong AES encryption found in WinRAR and the new versions of WinZip
    Exploits all known vulnerabilities and implementation flaws in the various compression algorithms for faster recovery
    Speedy known-plaintext attack recovers certain ZIP and ARJ archives in minutes (user must supply at least one unprotected file from that archive)
    Interrupt and resume operation at any time
    Supports background operation by utilizing idle CPU cycles only
    Dictionary and brute-force attacks with user-defined masks and advanced templates
    Highly optimized low-level code for optimum performance

Universal Compatibility

Supporting a wide range of compression and encryption algorithms, all versions of popular archivers and multiple archive formats, Advanced Archive Password Recovery comes as close to being a truly universal recovery tool as no one else.

Advanced Archive Password Recovery unlocks archives compressed with various methods from legacy Shrinking, Reducing, Imploding, and Tokenizing to modern Inflating and recent WavPack, BZip2 and PPMd.
Recover Archives in Minutes: Special Cases

Certain ZIP and ARJ archives can be unlocked and decrypted in just minutes, provided that you have at least one unprotected file from that archive at your discretion. It does not matter how long and complex the password is! If you have a file from the encrypted ZIP archive in your hands, the whole archive can be usually unlocked in minutes by applying the known-plain text attack. Similar ARJ archives are unlocked instantly. Fast recovery available only in case of "classical" encryption, not AES.
Guaranteed Recovery: Special Cases

After carefully analyzing the algorithms and implementations of password protection in different versions of Win-zip, El-com Soft developed a work-around solution to allow quick guaranteed decryption of certain ZIP archives instead of performing lengthy attacks. If an encrypted ZIP archive was created with WinZip version 8 or earlier, and if the archive contains 5 or more files, Advanced Archive Password Recovery can unlock the archive and decrypt its content – guaranteed! A modern PC takes just under one hour to finish the job. Guaranteed recovery available only in case of "classical" encryption, not AES.

Advanced Archive Password Recovery is well aware of the various methods of password protection, and implements all the tricks that allow you to recover protected archives as quickly as possible.
Strong AES Encryption Support

Advanced Archive Password Recovery supports latest encryption technologies, including the complex AES encryption used in WinRAR and the recent versions of WinZip. Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is a strong cipher used as an encryption standard by the U.S. government, military and Special Forces. AES has been extensively analyzed by cryptography specialists worldwide, and is a proven international standard for strong data protection.

If nothing else helps, Advanced Archive Password Recovery performs a range of attacks on a protected archive in order to obtain the original password. Even then you’re not left without options! If you remember something about the password, that information will be used to speed up the recovery. Don’t take anything for a given! Just specifying your company security policy can increase the speed of the attack tenfold. Remember how many characters your password had, or that it was certainly longer than a certain length? Sure your password had numbers or letters, or both? Maybe you can recollect the first or the last character, or remember whether it was a letter or a number? Every little bit of extra information helps to speed up the recovery.
Dictionary Attack

Most passwords used by human beings are based on a single word or a combination of words from a certain language. Before reverting to the brute force attack, Advanced Archive Password Recovery performs a full-scaled comprehensive attack based on a dictionary. Use a small built-in dictionary or specify your own dictionaries no matter the language, and Advanced Archive Password Recovery will attempt single words and word combinations in different cases and variations.
Brute Force Attack

If you’re blank about the password, Advanced Archive Password Recovery will revert to the last resort: the brute force attack. Thanks to the highly optimized low-level code, Advanced Archive Password Recovery provides the best-in-class performance for the brute-force password recovery, attempting millions different password combinations per second on a typical ZIP archive with a modern CPU. As many people tend to choose short, simple passwords, the brute-force attack remains a viable option for password recovery.