# Bkcrack | Crack Legacy Zip Encryption With Biham And Kocher’s Known Plaintext Attack **URL:** \ **Category:** Tools & Scripts\ **Tags:** tools, privacy, freebies\ **Created:** [January 13, 2023, 7:05pm UTC](https://onehack.st/t/bkcrack-crack-legacy-zip-encryption-with-biham-and-kocher-s-known-plaintext-attack/231271 "2023-01-13T19:05:14Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![BlueHacker](https://onehack.st/user_avatar/onehack.st/bluehacker/32/174721_2.png) [@BlueHacker](https://onehack.st/u/BlueHacker)\ **Post date:** [January 13, 2023, 7:05pm UTC](https://onehack.st/t/bkcrack-crack-legacy-zip-encryption-with-biham-and-kocher-s-known-plaintext-attack/231271/1 "2023-01-13T19:05:15Z")
![image](https://onehack.st/uploads/default/original/3X/d/e/de2704282a71510040fe3326ad94c2d4bacb5c8a.png) [![CI badge](https://github.com/kimci86/bkcrack/actions/workflows/ci.yml/badge.svg)](https://github.com/kimci86/bkcrack/actions/workflows/ci.yml) [![release badge](https://camo.githubusercontent.com/355ec4cbe976762b56040a4541c378fd67cf78560468f380873cd850ba2da181/68747470733a2f2f696d672e736869656c64732e696f2f6769746875622f762f72656c656173652f6b696d636938362f626b637261636b)](https://github.com/kimci86/bkcrack/releases) [![license badge](https://camo.githubusercontent.com/6595e7a03b0a4722049991ecef6f7354a7a23e76b2afe87cd0cf309d86fd5790/68747470733a2f2f696d672e736869656c64732e696f2f6769746875622f6c6963656e73652f6b696d636938362f626b637261636b3f636f6c6f723d696e666f726d6174696f6e616c)](https://github.com/kimci86/bkcrack/blob/master/license.txt) Crack legacy zip encryption with Biham and Kocher’s known plaintext attack. ## Overview A ZIP archive may contain many entries whose content can be compressed and/or encrypted. In particular, entries can be encrypted with a password-based symmetric encryption algorithm referred to as traditional PKWARE encryption, legacy encryption or ZipCrypto. This algorithm generates a pseudo-random stream of bytes (keystream) which is XORed to the entry’s content (plaintext) to produce encrypted data (ciphertext). The generator’s state, made of three 32-bits integers, is initialized using the password and then continuously updated with plaintext as encryption goes on. This encryption algorithm is vulnerable to known plaintext attacks as shown by Eli Biham and Paul C. Kocher in the research paper [A known plaintext attack on the PKZIP stream cipher](https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-60590-8_12). Given ciphertext and 12 or more bytes of the corresponding plaintext, the internal state of the keystream generator can be recovered. This internal state is enough to decipher ciphertext entirely as well as other entries which were encrypted with the same password. It can also be used to bruteforce the password with a complexity of _nl-6_ where _n_ is the size of the character set and _l_ is the length of the password. **bkcrack** is a command-line tool which implements this known plaintext attack. The main features are: - Recover internal state from ciphertext and plaintext. - Change a ZIP archive’s password using the internal state. - Recover the original password from the internal state. ## Install ### Precompiled packages You can get the latest official release on [GitHub](https://github.com/kimci86/bkcrack/releases). Precompiled packages for Ubuntu, MacOS and Windows are available for download. Extract the downloaded archive wherever you like. On Windows, Microsoft runtime libraries are needed for bkcrack to run. If they are not already installed on your system, download and install the latest Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable package. ### Compile from source Alternatively, you can compile the project with [CMake](https://cmake.org/). First, download the source files or clone the git repository. Then, running the following commands in the source tree will create an installation in the `install` folder. ```auto cmake -S . -B build -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=install cmake --build build --config Release cmake --build build --config Release --target install ``` ### Thrid-party packages [![Packaging status](https://camo.githubusercontent.com/81ee985d5333833014eb6234ca1400ccd8bf8ac7be9783f53761525b7ab998e9/68747470733a2f2f7265706f6c6f67792e6f72672f62616467652f766572746963616c2d616c6c7265706f732f626b637261636b2e737667)](https://repology.org/project/bkcrack/versions) bkcrack is available in the package repositories listed on the right. Those packages are provided by external maintainers. ## Usage ### List entries You can see a list of entry names and metadata in an archive named `archive.zip` like this: ```auto bkcrack -L archive.zip ``` Entries using ZipCrypto encryption are vulnerable to a known-plaintext attack. ### Recover internal keys The attack requires at least 12 bytes of known plaintext. At least 8 of them must be contiguous. The larger the contiguous known plaintext, the faster the attack. #### Load data from zip archives Having a zip archive `encrypted.zip` with the entry `cipher` being the ciphertext and `plain.zip` with the entry `plain` as the known plaintext, bkcrack can be run like this: ```auto bkcrack -C encrypted.zip -c cipher -P plain.zip -p plain ``` #### Load data from files Having a file `cipherfile` with the ciphertext (starting with the 12 bytes corresponding to the encryption header) and `plainfile` with the known plaintext, bkcrack can be run like this: ```auto bkcrack -c cipherfile -p plainfile ``` #### Offset If the plaintext corresponds to a part other than the beginning of the ciphertext, you can specify an offset. It can be negative if the plaintext includes a part of the encryption header. ```auto bkcrack -c cipherfile -p plainfile -o offset ``` #### Sparse plaintext If you know little contiguous plaintext (between 8 and 11 bytes), but know some bytes at some other known offsets, you can provide this information to reach the requirement of a total of 12 known bytes. To do so, use the `-x` flag followed by an offset and bytes in hexadecimal. ```auto bkcrack -c cipherfile -p plainfile -x 25 4b4f -x 30 21 ``` #### Number of threads If bkcrack was built with parallel mode enabled, the number of threads used can be set through the environment variable `OMP_NUM_THREADS`. ### Decipher If the attack is successful, the deciphered data associated to the ciphertext used for the attack can be saved: ```auto bkcrack -c cipherfile -p plainfile -d decipheredfile ``` If the keys are known from a previous attack, it is possible to use bkcrack to decipher data: ```auto bkcrack -c cipherfile -k 12345678 23456789 34567890 -d decipheredfile ``` #### Decompress The deciphered data might be compressed depending on whether compression was used or not when the zip file was created. If deflate compression was used, a Python 3 script provided in the `tools` folder may be used to decompress data. ```auto python3 tools/inflate.py < decipheredfile > decompressedfile ``` ### Unlock encrypted archive It is also possible to generate a new encrypted archive with the password of your choice: ```auto bkcrack -C encrypted.zip -k 12345678 23456789 34567890 -U unlocked.zip password ``` The archive generated this way can be extracted using any zip file utility with the new password. It assumes that every entry was originally encrypted with the same password. ### Recover password Given the internal keys, bkcrack can try to find the original password. You can look for a password up to a given length using a given character set: ```auto bkcrack -k 1ded830c 24454157 7213b8c5 -r 10 ?p ``` You can be more specific by specifying a minimal password length: ```auto bkcrack -k 18f285c6 881f2169 b35d661d -r 11..13 ?p ``` ## Learn A tutorial is provided in the `example` folder. For more information, have a look at the documentation and read the source. ## Contribute Do not hesitate to suggest improvements or submit pull requests on [GitHub](https://github.com/kimci86/bkcrack). ## License This project is provided under the terms of the [zlib/png license](http://opensource.org/licenses/Zlib). ## GitHub: > **[GitHub - kimci86/bkcrack: Crack legacy zip encryption with Biham and...](https://github.com/kimci86/bkcrack)** > > Crack legacy zip encryption with Biham and Kocher's known plaintext attack.