Java Zip Archive Bruteforcer

A while ago I was wondering how to access encrypted zip archives. A real dumb – but simple to make – way is to bruteforce every single possible password and try it to decrypt the archive with it. So I first wrote a little piece of code to bruteforce words from a given characters list. Here you can download the version written in python, but I decided to go for Java to make this program, as I haven’t started using python yet at the time. Then I had to interface my java program with the zip archives: I used the zip4j library, you can find it here.

Imported the library in the project, changed a little bit of code to make it use the generated passwords to unpack it, some other tweaks and it was done.

I decided to make the program look as a command-line utility, so I also added the arguments handling and an help menu.

Here’s a screenshot of how it looks in the Ubuntu terminal on my machine.

If you want to use this, here’s the jar executable, and you can also find the code on my GitHub.