ZIPs tricks

There are a handful of command-line tools for zip files that will be useful to know about.

• unzip will often output helpful information on why a zip will not decompress.

• zipdetails -v will provide in-depth information on the values present in the various fields of the format.

• zipinfo lists information about the zip file's contents, without extracting it.

• zip -F input.zip --out output.zip and zip -FF input.zip --out output.zip attempt to repair a corrupted zip file.

• fcrackzip brute-force guesses a zip password (for passwords <7 characters or so).

Zip file format specification

One important security-related note about password-protected zip files is that they do not encrypt the filenames and original file sizes of the compressed files they contain, unlike password-protected RAR or 7z files.

Another note about zip cracking is that if you have an unencrypted/uncompressed copy of any one of the files that is compressed in the encrypted zip, you can perform a "plaintext attack" and crack the zip, as detailed here, and explained in this paper. The newer scheme for password-protecting zip files (with AES-256, rather than "ZipCrypto") does not have this weakness.

From: https://app.gitbook.com/@cpol/s/hacktricks/~/edit/drafts/-LlM5mCby8ex5pOeV4pJ/forensics/basic-forensics-esp/zips-tricks