BRUTEFORCE-LUKS(1)

💖 BRUTEFORCE-LUKS(1) 💖

okay bestie, so this is bruteforce-luks — it lives in the Bruteforce LUKS encrypted volume section of the manual, and it's literally your girl for when you forgot a password and need to get back into your own stuff. no cap. 🎀

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✨ NAME ✨

bruteforce-luks — try to find the password of a LUKS volume 🔓

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🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

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

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

so the whole purpose of this program, the entire main character energy of it, is to try to find the password of a LUKS encrypted volume. that's it. that's the vibe. 💅

it can be used in two ways, and both of them are valid:

• brute force attack — it tries all the possible passwords given a character set. this one is especially useful if you already know something about the password, like… you forgot a part of your password but still remember most of it 🫶. and ngl, 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. it's giving "please have some info first" 😭
• dictionary attack — it tries all the passwords in a file. simple. clean. iconic. 📖

the program can use several threads, and the number of threads can be specified with the -t command line option. parallelism slay 🔥

also: sending a USR1 signal to a running bruteforce-luks process makes it print progress info to standard error and continue. so you can just vibe check it mid-run and it keeps going 💖

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💅 OPTIONS 💅

• -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. dictionary mode activated 🍓
• -h — show help and quit. bye bestie 👋
• -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). it's giving save-point energy 🎮

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🌈 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. lowkey a life hack ✨

sudo dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/tmp/luks-header bs=1M count=10
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

bestie reminder: this whole thing only works on volumes you're actually allowed to be opening, mkay? 🫶

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and that's the page!! it's BRUTEFORCE-LUKS version 1.4.0, dated November 2019, and honestly? it ate. go get your password back, queen 👑💜