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?

>>36
The fact that /dev/urandom never blocks doesn't mean it'll just put out a series of 0s once its entropy runs out. Random noise generated by a PRNG is just as incompressible as ``genuine'' randomness.