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7z

In computing, 7z is an archive format which allows data compression using a number of compression algorithms. The format was initially implemented by the 7-Zip archiver but the file format is public and 7-Zip's implementation of it is publicly available under the GNU LGPL licence.

The main features of the 7z format are:

The format's open architecture allows additional compression methods to be added to the standard. The following are defined in the current version: 7z also supports encryption with the AES algorithm with a 256-bit key. The key is generated from a user-supplied passphrase using an algorithm based on the SHA-256 hash algorithm (with a large number of iterations, to make a brute-force search for the passphrase more difficult).

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