Pa 2000

[RJWaring]

PA, a clients business uses PA 2000 (The Free Version) when it was around.

To this day they still use it, I will be sending them CSV and MD5 Extracts containing confidential data via compress zip format.

Now usually most people either have PA06/07, WinZip or Winrar. which are capable of reading AES256 Encryption. And this is the basic encryption I use to send data via email.

However, as far as I can remember back in the day of PA 2000 you only had a basic password option.

Can PA 2000 Read AES Encrypted files? and if so what type?

I have tried to push them to purchase the latest version of PA. But they are managed by a rather old IT department who beleave upgrades are a curse :D.

[Serhiy]

Hi,

The last free version of PowerArchiver (2001, v6.11) does not support aes encrypted zip files. ZIP AES Encryption Support was added in Version 9.00 (PowerArchiver 2004)…

thanks,

[RJWaring]

Cheers NTFS,

I knew someone would have an answer!

Leaves me with a slight pickle! they also use office 2000 where I use 2003/07.

I might send them a self extracting Encrypted File.

[Serhiy]

@Sir:

I might send them a self extracting Encrypted File.

Yes, I think .pae SFX is the best solution. Even AES ZIP encryption is not very strong. There are a lot of brute-force password recovery tools processing aes encrypted zips very fast (comparing for example to .rar 2.9 strong aes encryption)…

[spwolf]

@NTFS:

Yes, I think .pae SFX is the best solution. Even AES ZIP encryption is not very strong. There are a lot of brute-force password recovery tools processing aes encrypted zips very fast (comparing for example to .rar 2.9 strong aes encryption)…

zip aes 256bit = any aes 256bit… problem is that people use minimal passwords so it is easily bruteforced and sometimes they select aes 128bit, etc, etc…

[Serhiy]

@spwolf:

zip aes 256bit = any aes 256bit… problem is that people use minimal passwords so it is easily bruteforced and sometimes they select aes 128bit, etc, etc…

I just wanted to say that there are a lot of Legal password recovery utilities supporting aes zip…
PowerArchiver’s PAE format is not so popular and not everyone will be able to easily crack the password…