RELATED: Benchmarked: What's the Best File Compression Format? Even some third-party utilities are reluctant to switch to AES for their Zip encryption as it means those AES-encrypted zip files will then be incompatible with the built-in Zip features in Windows, Mac OS X, and other software. This means that using the Zip password-protection features found in Windows XP, current versions of Mac OS X, and even typical Linux desktops won’t give you securely encrypted Zip files. Unfortunately, many pieces of software - particularly operating systems with built-in support for Zip files - don’t support the newer AES encryption standard. The older Zip 2.0 encryption is extremely insecure, while the newer AES encryption is fairly secure. There are actually two types of Zip file encryption.