Tuesday 14 February 2017

Extracting encrypted pyinstaller executables

UPDATE: For recent PyInstaller versions, the script below won't work. Please visit the pyinstxtractor wiki for more information.
 
It has been more than a quarter since the last post, and in the meantime, I was very busy and did not have the time to write a proper post. The good news is at the moment, I am comparatively free and can put in a quick post. 

As said earlier, PyInstaller provides an option to encrypt the embedded files within the executable. This feature can be used by supplying an argument --key=key-string while generating the executable. 

Detecting encrypted pyinstaller executables is simple. If  pyinstxtractor is used, it would indicate this as shown in Figure 1.

Trying to extract encrypted pyinstaller archive
Figure 1: Trying to extract encrypted pyinstaller archive