Bruteforce-LUKS

The purpose of this program is to try to find the password of a LUKS encrypted volume.

It can be used in two ways:

• try all the possible passwords given a charset
• try all the passwords in a file

There is a command line option to specify the number of threads to use.

Sending a USR1 signal to a running bruteforce-luks process makes it print progress and continue.

Exhaustive mode

The program tries to decrypt at least one of the key slots by trying all the possible passwords. It is especially useful if you know something about the password (i.e. you forgot a part of your password but still remember most of it). Finding the password of a volume without knowing anything about it would take way too much time (unless the password is really short and/or weak).

There are command line options to specify:

• the minimum password length to try
• the maximum password length to try
• the beginning of the password
• the end of the password
• the character set to use (among the characters of the current locale)

Dictionary mode

The program tries to decrypt at least one of the key slots by trying all the passwords contained in a file. The file must have one password per line.

Usage

Usage: bruteforce-luks [options] <path to LUKS volume>

Option	Description
-b <string>	Beginning of the password. Default: ""
-e <string>	End of the password. Default: ""
-f <file>	Read the passwords from a file instead of generating them.
-h	Show help and quit.
-l <length>	Minimum password length (beginning and end included). Default: 1
-m <length>	Maximum password length (beginning and end included). Default: 8
-s <string>	Password character set. Default: "0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz"
-t <n>	Number of threads to use. Default: 1
-v <n>	Print progress info every n seconds.
-w <file>	Restore the state of a previous session if the file exists, then write the state to the file regularly (~ every minute).

Examples

Try to find the password of a LUKS encrypted volume using 4 threads, trying only passwords with 5 characters: bruteforce-luks -t 4 -l 5 -m 5 /dev/sdb1

Try to find the password of a LUKS encrypted volume using 8 threads, trying only passwords with 5 to 10 characters beginning with “W4l” and ending with “z”: bruteforce-luks -t 8 -l 5 -m 10 -b "W4l" -e "z" /dev/sda2

Try to find the password of a LUKS encrypted volume using 8 threads, trying only passwords with 10 characters using the character set “P情8ŭ”: bruteforce-luks -t 8 -l 10 -m 10 -s "P情8ŭ" /dev/sdc3

Try to find the password of a LUKS encrypted volume using 6 threads, trying the passwords contained in a dictionary file: bruteforce-luks -t 6 -f dictionary.txt /dev/sdd1

Instead of passing a block device to the program, you can copy the beginning of the LUKS volume to a file and pass this file to the program:

sudo cryptsetup luksHeaderBackup --header-backup-file /tmp/luks-header /dev/sda1
sudo chown $USER /tmp/luks-header
bruteforce-luks -t 4 -l 5 -m 5 /tmp/luks-header

Print progress info: pkill -USR1 -f bruteforce-luks

Print progress info every 30 seconds: bruteforce-luks -t 6 -f dictionary.txt -v 30 /dev/sdd1

Save/restore state between sessions

bruteforce-luks -t 6 -f dictionary.txt -w state.txt /dev/sdd1
# (Let the program run for a few minutes and stop it)
bruteforce-luks -t 6 -w state.txt /dev/sdd1