I have an old password protected RAR file with a random generated password that I lost. I still have some of the files outside, but need the rest.
Is there a way to obtain the password by comparing the same file, inside and outside the RAR?
Btw, filenames and attributes of my RAR luckily are not hidden, and all the files are protected with the same password.
Is there a way to obtain the password by comparing the same file, inside and outside the rar?
Without getting into to much detail, its like like me handing you a book in a foreign language after I removed letters from every word and rearranged all the pages. Would you be able to recreate that entire book in English? Probably not. And when I say probably, I mean no.
But that doesnt mean you cant recover the data. The weak link in the chain is the password. There are rar password crackers out there and they work. However, they use dictionary and bruteforce methods. The dictionary attack is useless, as you said you used a randomly generated password. A dictionary attack uses -well a dictionary. It may use a real dictionary and commonly known non-word passwords. The brute force method will work... eventually. You could get lucky and get the password in few hours, or it could take years, depending on the password length and complexity.
I've been reading about it and seems it can't be done this way. What I was trying to do is called known-plaintext attack, that would work if were a ZIP or ARJ file, but not on RAR because its AES encryption.
I've already tried bruteforce attacks for months without any result, so it seems impossible to get my files back. Thanks to all anyway.
Amazing thing about modern cryptography is that even if you have two identical files and one is encrypted, it's still ridiculously difficult to determine the hash that would decrypt the encrypted file.
Having said that, access to an un-encrypted version of an encrypted file would be of some assistance to those few in the world that hack and crack for a living.
