Methods and Systems of Information Protection, Information Security

BUILT-IN WINDOWS OS ARCHIVING TOOLS: SECURITY CONCERNS

P. A. Berezhnaya , K. D. Mirchevski
UDC: 004.056.5 Published: 01.06.2026 Issue: Vol. 2 No. 010 (2026): Professionalitet, 2026 DOI: 10.24412/3033-9359-2026-010-20-29
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Abstract

The article presents an experimental study of a limitation of the native Windows archiving tools: the lack of built-in password protection. The aim is to develop and test a method for creating cryptographically strong password-protected archives using only built-in OS components (PowerShell and .NET Framework), without third-party software. On a Windows 11 test bench, the standard Compress-Archive utility was combined with AES-256 symmetric encryption. The encryption key was derived with PBKDF2 using a configurable iteration count and a cryptographic salt. A custom PowerShell script was used to simulate a brute-force password attack. The results show that increasing password length substantially expands the search space: each additional character increases it by a factor of 10 for numeric passwords or 62 for alphanumeric passwords. Reducing the PBKDF2 iteration count from 10,000 to 100 increased the brute-force rate by a factor of 44.5, demonstrating the importance of correctly configuring all security parameters. The study also notes that modern specialized hardware can accelerate brute-force attacks by orders of magnitude, so long passwords and current recommended iteration counts are required in practice. The hypotheses were confirmed. The proposed approach can provide cryptographic strength comparable in principle to third-party archivers when current cryptographic practices are followed. The method is practically relevant to system administrators, end users, and information-security education.

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License

Copyright (c) 2026 P. A. Berezhnaya, K. D. Mirchevski (Author)

Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0

Keywords

Windows archiving data security PowerShell encryption AES built-in tools