by Martin Brinkmann on February 22, 2019 in Software – 11 comments
7-Zip 19.00 was released as a stable version on February 21, 2019. The new version of the open source program to manage archives is the first stable release of 2019. It comes a day after the disclosure of a critical vulnerability in WinRAR and several other programs that rely on an old library file.
The program is offered as a 32-bit or 64-bit version for Microsoft Windows devices. 7-Zip supports all major client and server versions of Windows, including those that are no longer supported by Microsoft.
You can run 7-Zip on Windows NT or Windows 2000 devices and it should run fine on those. Existing users may download the new installer from the 7-Zip website to install the new version over the current installation.
The changelog published by Igor Pavlov, the developer of 7-Zip, has two entries only. The main improvement in the new version is an increase in the encryption strength of 7z archives.
The developer increased the random initialization vector size from 64-bit to 128-bit and improved the pseudo-random number generator next to that.
Encryption strength for 7z archives was increased:
the size of random initialization vector was increased from 64-bit to 128-bit, and the pseudo-random number generator was improved.
The 7z archive format is the native format of 7-Zip. 7-Zip users may type a password in the creation dialog to encrypt archives. Just select the 7z archive format as the compression format and type a password to create an archive with improved encryption strength. You may also encrypt file names to obfuscate those.
Several — unnamed — bugs were fixed in the new version next to that.
Previous versions, three in total were released in 2018 — 7-Zip 18.01, 18.05 and 18.06 — improved performance and memory utilization among other things.
Closing Words
7-Zip is a popular open source software to manage — create and extract — archives. It supports all popular formats and many lesser popular formats, encryption, multiple volumes, different compression options and a lot more.
Now You: Which archive software do you use, and why? My favorite program is Bandizip.