fcrackzip

Blurb

Why, the hell, another zip cracker?

Naturally, programs are born out of an actual need. The situation with fcrackzip was no different... I'm not using zip very much, but recently I needed a password cracker. "Sure", I thought, "there are hundreds of them out there, I'll just gonna get one!". This wasn't so easy, in fact, none of the zipcrackers I found were able to find the passwords, either they didn't accept more than one zipfile, were awfully slow, or didn't do brute force attacks (which I needed). The worst thing was: no source!.

Why is no source such a bad thing?

[insert big chapter about the free software spirit here ;)], anyway people will never learn... You will find reasons why it's much better to provide source to your programs here, at opensource.org, and here, at the Free Software Foundation. Now, what are the features of fcrackzip?

• FREE

  It doesn't cost anything, it will run on many architectures, and the source is freely available, so you can customise it to your needs. If you make improvements, don't hesitate to mail them to me, and I will include them in fcrackzip!

  One goal of fcrackzip was to provide a free but still fast zipcracker, so that other people can improve and contribute it further, in an open developement style.

  Other programs, like fzc, come not only without source, but the executable is even encrypted, so improving it or customizing it is difficult at best. (Maybe the programmers of other crackers don't want that people see how crappy their code actually is? Nobody knows for sure, but I see no other reason for this strange, but common, behaviour)

• FAST

  On my old machine (a pentium-90), the portable C version is 12% slower than fzc, the fastest cracker I could find. Small parts of fcrackzip have been converted to x86 assembly, so it performs a bit faster (around 4%) than fzc now, on the same hardware (note: this is highly os/compiler dependent). Since the author of fzc claims that it is written fully in assembler, further improvements might well be possible. Incidently, on my new P-II machine, fcrackzip is almost twice as fast as fzc ;)

• PORTABLE

  fcrackzip was written in ISO-C, and should run on most platforms, even 64 bit ones (maybe after some tweaking). I'll be glad to hear about portability problems so I can fix them.

• FEATUREFUL

  fcrackzip will, at some later stage at least, support many more useful operation modes than other crackers. It already supports multiple zip files with multiple files. Remember that the code is only a few hours old!

  However, since version 0.2.0 fcrackzip also includes a mode to brute force cpmask'ed images, something no other program (that I know of) can do, so at least there is one feature other crackers don't have.

  And you can always implement your own modes.

Caveat, Imperator!

Naturally, there are also some drawbacks. At the moment, fcrackzip is a bit slower than necessary, and lacks some important (or nice) features, like automatic unzip-testing and others. On the other hand, fcrackzip-0.0.1 was hacked together in under ten hours, and you can always modify the source (and send me patches!!!) (I hope I've made it clear now ;)