bruteforce-luks(1)

Usage

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

Overview

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

It can be used in two ways:

• brute force attack: try all the possible passwords given a character set. 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).

• dictionary attack: try all the passwords in a file.

The program can use several threads (the number of threads can be specified with the -t command line option).

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

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.

-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: "0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTU
VWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz"

-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 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

History

Debian 13 (Trixie) to Debian 12 (Bookworm): the text shown here
Debian 11 (Bullseye) to Debian 10 (Buster)
Debian 9 (Stretch)

-v since Debian 10 (Buster); -w since Debian 10 (Buster).