Recover a ZIP password on macOS

What macOS does with encrypted ZIPs

On a Mac, encrypted ZIP archives are handled by Archive Utility, the small system app that expands compressed files when you double-click them. If the archive is password protected, Archive Utility prompts you for the password and then extracts the contents. That is the whole of its capability. It is an extraction tool, not a recovery tool, so if you no longer remember the password it cannot help you find it. That distinction trips up a lot of people, because the prompt looks like it might eventually give way, when in truth it simply repeats until the correct password is entered.

It is also worth knowing what macOS creates. The built-in tooling generally works with legacy ZipCrypto rather than WinZip AES. The command-line zip utility with its encrypt option produces ZipCrypto archives, while Finder's Compress command makes ordinary ZIPs with no password option at all. If your archive is AES-encrypted, it was made by a third-party app or on another platform, and a third-party app is no guarantee of AES: Keka, a Mac archiver, writes its ZIP files with legacy ZipCrypto unless its Use AES-256 encryption box is ticked. Knowing the scheme is useful, since an AES archive tells you to expect slow testing and to lean on a precise dictionary or mask rather than a wide search.

Inspect the archive in Terminal

Terminal gives you a quick look at what is inside without extracting anything. Open Terminal from Applications, then Utilities, and change to the folder holding your archive.

1. Run unzip archive.zip to attempt extraction. If the archive is encrypted, it prompts for the password before continuing.
2. Run zipinfo -v archive.zip for a verbose listing that shows each entry and its attributes, including whether an entry is encrypted.
3. Run unzip -v archive.zip for a compact table of entries, sizes, and compression details.

The built-in unzip (Info-ZIP UnZip 6.00, from 2009) does not support WinZip AES, so it can read ZipCrypto but cannot extract AES entries. If it reports an unsupported method, that is a strong hint the archive uses AES. For a direct answer, zipinfo -v reports a WinZip AES entry as compression method: unknown (99), and the recovery tool names the scheme as soon as it has read the file; the guide to encrypted ZIP files explains what each marker means.

Recover the password with ZipRecover

When you need the password itself rather than just extraction, ZipRecover runs entirely in a modern browser on macOS. Current Safari, Chrome, and Firefox run it: the end-to-end tests drive the recovery page in Chromium, and on 27 September 2026 in WebKit (Safari's engine) and Firefox too. The archive is read and every candidate is tested on your own Mac, with no upload step, so a private file stays private. There is no installer, no background app, and no system permission to grant; the browser tab does all of the work.

1. Select the file. Open the recovery tool and choose the ZIP from your Mac. The browser reads its bytes locally and detects whether it uses ZipCrypto or WinZip AES.
2. Choose a strategy. Use a dictionary of passwords you might have set, a mask if you remember the shape, or a bounded brute-force run for a short password. A focused dictionary or mask is far more effective than a wide search, especially on AES.
3. Confirm and start. Tick the box confirming you own the archive or are authorized to open it; the Start recovery button stays locked until you do. Then begin the run.
4. Read the result. A candidate that passes the fast pre-check is confirmed before it is reported whenever the archive allows it: the HMAC for AES, and decryption plus the CRC-32 for a ZipCrypto entry of at least 4 bytes that is stored or Deflate-compressed, which is nearly every archive. When only a shorter or differently compressed ZipCrypto entry can be tested, the result says the password passed a quick check only. Either way it appears in your tab alone.

On a Mac, remember that Archive Utility only prompts for a password and extracts; it never recovers one, so identify the scheme before you begin. If you set the password and remember part of it, a dictionary or mask that fits it can finish in seconds on ZipCrypto, and on AES too when the search is small. A long random password on an AES archive is effectively not recoverable by guessing, which is the point of that encryption, so shift your effort toward locating a saved copy instead. The same approach works in the Windows guide and the Linux guide, and the forgot your ZIP password checklist helps when the password is one you chose.