I initially said it was impossible to prevent people from wasting their time.
Here is a longer, probably more effective explanation of why you shouldn't even try:
- Widely used archive software such as 7zip or WinRar was created 20 years ago. People who have knowledge of major security holes in them will not share them with you for free, and there is certainly no software out there that will use them to crack passwords.
- This leaves us with brute force attack - trying every possible password until we get a match.
- Both 7zip and WinRar use AES encryption which has built-in brute force attack protection. Even using modern multicore CPUs, you will get a rate of at most 10 thousand passwords(hashes) per second. Here is a good approximation of how long this will take for different passwords:
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. Enter any password and look for the "10k" result.
Even with an "easy" password like "ilovemypatrons", you are looking at centuries using CPU, or weeks using GPU.
If you still want to hammer your system just get some more porn, you can use open source tools like
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and
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. Yes, they are command line tools, but GUI apps will use the same algorithms and also charge you for it.
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