WinRAR Registry variables

Registry variables

In multi-user environment it may be important to disable access to some of WinRAR functions for security reasons. If you need to do it, create Registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\WinRAR\Policy

or

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\WinRAR\Policy

Key in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE has a higher priority than in HKEY_CURRENT_USER.

This key may contain the following values:

Value nameValue typeDescription

MenuDWORDIf set to 0, disables WinRAR main menu.

SettingsDWORDIf set to 0, disables "Settings" dialog, "Settings/Import and export" submenu commands and toolbar context menu.

PasswordDWORDIf set to 0, disables change of archiving password. It may help to avoid encrypting of important data.

OrgPasswordsDWORDIf set to 0, access to "Organize passwords" dialog is disabled. It does not disable access to passwords already stored in this dialog, so you may need to delete them before setting OrgPasswords variable.

ShutdownDWORDIf set to 0, disables "When done" archiving option, so a user cannot shut down, sleep, hibernate or restart PC.

BenchmarkDWORDIf set to 0, disables "Benchmark" command. In multi-user environment "Benchmark" command might abuse shared computational resources.

It might be necessary to restart WinRAR after policy change. Policy key does not affect the console RAR (rar.exe file), so for better security in multi-user environment you may need to delete Rar.exe and keep only WinRAR.exe.

Also you can override the location of %APPDATA%\WinRAR folder, specifying a new path to WinRAR supplementary files in string value "AppData" of HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\WinRAR\Paths Registry key.