How do I recover the password of a RAR file on Mac OS X?
You can bypass the hash extraction altogether and use cRARk instead. cRARk is a freeware command-line RAR password cracking utility available for Windows, Mac and Linux. It is also designed to work with CUDA so you may want to take advantage of that if you have a powerful GPU.
One caveat is that it will take very long to crack an archive if you know nothing about the password, and it is > 6 characters in length. If you do know a small detail about the password, such as the approximate number of characters, it allows you to input that as a switch to dramatically shorten cracking time. Even though cRARk is one of the fastest RAR crackers out there using extremely optimized MMX & SSE code, this holds true for any brute force application. When cracking longer passwords, it will take a substantially longer amount of time due to the myriad of possibilities to try.
Here's a sample run of cracking the password 'john':
C:\>crark.exe -c -l4 -g4 Chap7.rar cRARk 3.2d (CUDA enabled) Freeware Copyright 1995-2001, 2006-09 by P. Semjanov, http://www.crark.net portions (c) 1993-2005 Eugene Roshal (c) PSW-soft Password Cracking Library PCL v. 2.0d by P. Semjanov Testing archive Chap7.rar : version 2.9 Testing Chap7.rtf Choosing best crypto functions................................................. Chosen: ASM (Prescott/AMD), SSE2 (P4/Core 2) (-f1114) Ticks per password expected = 40438280, theoretical = 27000000, CPU rate = 0.67 Processing line 56 of password definition file... Testing 4-chars passwords ... ckdk Passwords tested = 42000 (time = 3:45.00, rate = 186 p/s) elka Passwords tested = 78000 (time = 6:58.99, rate = 186 p/s) john - CRC OK In hex (PCL style): \6A \6F \68 \6E Passwords tested = 167844 (time = 15:02.38, rate = 186 p/s) Total tested = 167844, slow tests = 20914
Not too shabby ;)
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Josh K
Me I'm a software engineer living in New York City. Currently I'm available for consulting work, previously I founded JAKT a leading design and development consultancy that uses technology to solve problems for entrepreneurs and corporations. You can read more about me at joshuakehn.com or @joshkehn. Common Links: Guidelines for Constructive Questions FAQ
Updated on September 17, 2022Comments
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Josh K over 1 year
I'm running Mac OS X 10.6.2 and have been handed a couple of old files that need to be extracted. Old backups or finances or bills I believe. They are RAR files, and password protected. Is there a way to extract the hash from these files so I can feed it into John The Ripper or Cain and Abel?
Edit
I have downloaded cRARk, but unfortunately nothing I have (SimplyRAR, RAR Expander, The Unarchiver) will extract it without a password. Can someone verify that I'm crazy and there is no password on the Mac version?
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William Hilsum about 14 years+1 better than my answer and missed the osx tag
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Josh K about 14 yearsI'll give it a try. Was kinda hoping I'd get an answer before putting the bounty on. :)
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John T about 14 years@Josh sorry about that! This was my first time seeing the question, adding the bounty bumped it to the top of the page.
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Josh K about 14 years@John: Hey, no problems. I get an answer, though it doesn't look like the added rep will leave a mark on you.
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John T about 14 years@Josh when using cRARk it comes with a 'crackme' file. You can extract everything else in the file just fine. The crackme is for you to test the program.
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Joe about 13 yearsDoes anyone know the syntax for doing it on the Mac? I can't work it out... Thanks!
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rafa.ferreira over 4 yearsFor Mac is something like "./crark-hp -c -l4 -g4 ../YOURFILE.rar"
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DolDurma over 3 years@Johnt what's password of downloaded file from
crack.net
? when i try to un-compress archive, that try to getting password