
= Contents =

  System requirements
  Overview
  Registration
  History
  Contact information


= System requirements =

- Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP or Windows Server 2003  
- about 4 megabytes of free space on hard disk  
- about 34 megabytes of free memory for ZIP known plaintext attack  
- about 260 megabytes of free memory to process RAR 2.9 and 3.x archives  
 

= Overview =

Advanced Archive Password Recovery (or ARCHPR) is a program to recover lost or forgotten passwords to archives (compressed files) of the following types: 

- ZIP/PKZip/WinZip  
- ARJ/WinARJ  
- ACE/WinACE (1.x)  
- RAR/WinRAR  
 
The key features of ARCHPR are: 

- The program has a convenient user interface  
- The program is very fast: for ZIP, brute-force attack speed is up to fifteen million passwords per second on modern CPUs like Pentium 4 (Prescott)  
- Guaranteed decryption (usually, within the hour) of many WinZip archives (created in versions 8.0 and below, with 5+ encrypted files) is available; it works regardless the password complexity and length  
- The program can work with archives containing only one encrypted file  
- Archives created by various software packages are supported  
- Self-extracting archives are supported  
- The program is customizable: you can set the password length (or length range), the character set to be used to generate the passwords, and a couple of other options  
- You can select the custom character set for brute-force attack (non-English characters are supported)  
- Dictionary-based attack (with word mutations) is available  
- The "brute-force with mask" attack is available  
- Very fast known-plaintext attack is available (ZIP and ARJ only)  
- You can interrupt the program at any time, and resume from the same point later  
- The program can work in the background, using the CPU only when it is in idle state  
 
Please note, however, that for the password is not stored anywhere in the archive (ZIP/RAR/ARJ/ACE file), and so it cannot be just extracted or decrypted. Instead, ARCHPR can recover it by trying different passwords: all possible combinations in a given range, or from a wordlist, etc. ARCHPR can test as many as fifteen million passwords per second (for ZIP archives), and so the likelihood of finding a valid one is very high. There is still no guarantee that the password will be recovered, but here the human factor plays its role: most people use short and/or easy to remember passwords. We estimate the success rate as 90-95%. See the help file for more information. 


= Registration =

Unregistered (trial version) has some limitations; fully registered version costs $60 (personal license) or $120 (business license). See "order.txt" for more details.


= History =

See "whatsnew.txt".


= Contact information =

Please send your suggestions and bug reports to support@elcomsoft.com (don't forget to mention what version of ARCHPR you're using). The most current version of ARCHPR is always available at:

http://www.elcomsoft.com/archpr.html

Other password recovery products (for Microsoft Office and other Microsoft applications: Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint, Outlook, Outlook Express, Internet Explorer, Visio, VBA, MS Backup, MS Project, MS Mail, MS Schedule+; Lotus Organizer, Lotus 1-2-3, Lotus WordPro, Lotus Approach; Corel WordPerfect, Paradox and QuattroPro; ACT!; Intuit Quicken and QuickBooks; Adobe Acrobat PDF; most popular email clients and instant messengers; Windows 2000/XP Encrypting File System on NTFS; Windows NT/2000/XP user passwords; Windows PWL/RAS/dial-up/VPN/shares/asterisked passwords) are available at:

http://www.elcomsoft.com/prs.html
