AES Archive Password Recovery Utility
AAPR : a RAR Password Recovery toolAAPR, is a small utility that can help you recover password of encrypted archives. At present It only support RAR v3 with encrypted file names. It can perform 2 types of recovery methods : brute-force and dictionary.
AES is a very computationally intensive encryption scheme. Because there are no known flaws that could help speed up the process, the only simple way to to find the password is to try them all. It could take a very long time. If it's a long password, It won't be possible to recover it because it would take hundreds of years of CPU time to find it.
AAPR will hence only be useful is the password is weak : short, or a word in a dictionary.
If you already know some information about the password, AAPR could be very useful : I originally wrote the program because I had to open an archive I created a long time ago but could not remember the password. Because I don’t want to have too many passwords to remember (I remember quite a lot of them already), one thing I often do, is to combine several passwords I already know to create a stronger passwords. So I have been able to use AAPR successfully by compiling a list of all the passwords I thought I could have used, and telling AAPR to try all permutations.