If you want a genuinely free, private, and transparent solution, building your own script is best. Here is a working prototype.
d) 7-Zip / WinRAR (limited)
For months, that .rar file just sits on your desktop, useless. You can’t delete it (the data is too important), but you can’t open it either.
| Factor | Limitation | |--------|-------------| | | PHP is interpreted, ~10–50× slower than C/assembly for hash computations. | | Parallelism | Poor multithreading support; online scripts run in single request thread. | | Execution limits | Web hosts enforce max execution time (30–120s), memory limits (128–256MB). | | PBKDF2 overhead | Each password attempt requires thousands of SHA-1 or SHA-256 iterations. | | No GPU acceleration | PHP cannot leverage CUDA/OpenCL. |
: To recover a password online, you must upload the entire file to a third-party server. If that file contains sensitive personal information, tax documents, or private photos, you are essentially handing that data over to an unknown entity.
This is than any PHP script. John runs locally, does not time out, and uses your CPU/GPU fully.