how do passwords work?

newbie here. so consider this paradox: let's say you have a pass protected rar file. now the password should be stored somewhere in the file to compare against the inputted password. so if it's there how come you cant just extract it?

>>7
There's certainly a cleartext header at the start of an encrypted RAR file, but do you have a citation for the presence of any checksum or any reason to believe the payload isn't just a straightforward encrypted RAR file? It's annoyingly hard to find good information on the topic (mainly thanks to idiots like >>1 who are just looking for crackers), and I don't particularly want to spend my evening poring over a clusterfuck of Sepples code.