After seeing how to compile John the Ripper to use all your computer's processors now we can use it for some tasks that may be useful to digital forensic investigators: getting around passwords. Today we will focus on cracking passwords for ZIP and RAR archive files. Luckily, the JtR community has done most of the hard work for us. For this to work you need to have built the community version of John the Ripper since it has extra utilities for ZIP and RAR files.

• John The Ripper 0 Password Hashes Cracked 1 Left Hand Free
• John The Ripper 0 Password Hashes Cracked 1 Left Hand 2

For this exercise I have created password protected RAR and ZIP files, that each contain two files.

1. If john -show=left is run against a file with no hashes cracked yet, john will print statistics but will not print any password hashes. Only if at least one hash has been cracked will john print the remaining hashes from the file like it's supposed to. Tested against john 1.8.0-jumbo-1-5603-g70e8d4c+.
2. This has a “password hint” given, that will crack the password. Many same-salt hashes intended for testing of -ztex formats 3107 is the number of entries in an older revision of JtR's default password.lst wordlist.

Yes I've just discovered what the the mangling rules are. Root@kali:/ctf# rm./root/.john/john.pot root@kali:/ctf# john shadow.bak Warning: detected hash type 'sha512crypt', but the string is also recognized as 'crypt' Use the '-format=crypt' option to force loading these as that type instead Using default input encoding: UTF-8 Loaded 4 password hashes with 4 different salts (sha512crypt.

John The Ripper 0 Password Hashes Cracked 1 Left Hand Free

The password for the rar file is 'test1234' and the password for the zip file is 'test4321'.
In the 'run' folder of John the Ripper community version (I am using John-1.7.9-jumbo-7), there are two programs called 'zip2john' and 'rar2john'. Run them against their respective file types to extract the password hashes:
This will give you files that contain the password hashes to be cracked... something like this:
After, that you can run John the Ripper directly on the password hash files:
You should get a message like: Loaded 1 password hash (PKZIP [32/64]). By using John with no options it will use its default order of cracking modes. See the examples page for more information on modes.

John The Ripper 0 Password Hashes Cracked 1 Left Hand 2

Notice, in this case we are not using explicit dictionaries. You could potentially speed the cracking process up if you have an idea what the password may be. If you look at your processor usage, if only one is maxed out, then you did not enable OpenMP when building. If you have a multi-processor system, it will greatly speed up the cracking process.
Now sit back and wait for the cracking to finish. On a 64bit quad-core i7 system, without using GPU, and while doing some other CPU-intensive tasks, the password was cracked in 6.5 hours.
Now if you want to see the cracked passwords give john the following arguments:
It should output something like:
Note: the hash file should have the same type of hashes. For example, we cannot put the rar AND zip hashes in the same file. But this means you could try to crack more than one zip/rar file at a time.
For the rar file it did not take nearly as long since the password was relatively common. If you take a look at john.conf in the run directory, it has a list of the patterns it checks (in order). The pattern 12345 is much more likely than 54321, so it is checked first resulting in a quick crack.