I decided to start with digits only, from one to six. A small but effective wordlist, several common patterns like all small letters, then all caps, then a mix of small and caps (but shorter length) etc. Still negative.Īnything else to try? Sometimes users select the same password for their Apple ID and the backup I did not know the Apple ID password, and our partner didn’t know it either. I then made masks matching other passwords from the keychain that was a bit more difficult, and I had to use a small GPU cluster to complete the task in reasonable time. The result is negative even after expanding the mask search to include two digits at the end of the password. Even though iTunes backups use strong protection and password cracking is extremely slow on any hardware (less than 200 p/s on a last-gen NVIDIA board), we don’t have that many password to try in this case, and a solid part of the password is known if the backup password uses a similar pattern.Īfter a few minutes, we’re done with the check. We have an iTunes backup brute-forcing solution ( Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery), which is very flexible on pattern-based password search. There were just a few passwords totally different from those ones, though also predictable. Here, ‘a’ is a small letter, followed by a fixed 9-character part that is always the same (a mix of small and capital letters and digits), sometimes followed by a single digit. Long story short, they soon realized that most passwords were built using exactly the same simple pattern:

You still cannot view all of them at once, nor can you export them, so this is time-consuming manual work. Once you know the passcode, you can view the passwords stored in the device keychain (well, most of them). They decided to start with a kind of social engineering first. They did have the screen lock passcode, so it wasn’t a matter of life and death, but resetting the backup password is always the last resort with lots of negative consequences. No known exploits, no jailbreaks, and no known workarounds. If was a new device model a recent version of iOS. He had an iTunes-style backup of a device full of critical evidence, but the password locked him out of the data. I was recently contacted by an old partner from the other side of the world who asked for assistance in an urgent case. Have an iPhone backup but cannot get around the password protection? I have a story to share.

Itunes password to unlock iphone backup