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?

>>48
i'm not sure if you're just trolling or what, but i'm looking at a .tar.gz and a .tar.lzma both compressed from the same tar file (one with gzip then advdef -z4, the other with lzma -9), and the .tar.lzma is about 400KB larger.