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Let's say that a user has lost or forgotten their password. Is there a way to reset the password or recover it?

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  • These are related posts, but do not answer your question directly. I hope someone can make a walkthrough, I don't have the knowledge though. reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/46887p/… forum.ethereum.org/discussion/3045/… reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/3g6aw0/…
    – tayvano
    Commented Mar 12, 2016 at 17:43
  • First if all which wallet type is it? Geth, Mist or Ethereum Presale? They have slitghly different formats and require different approach to find the password as the encryption and requirements differ. The presale wallets must be of minimum 10 characters and can be brute forced using GPU cards that could generate millions of candidates per second with the right card. Geth on the othe hand has no password restrictions and could in some cases be encrypted with just one character. On the other hand its very slow and in most cases only a CPU with less that a 1000 candidates per sec can be used.
    – KeychainX
    Commented Mar 30 at 3:35

6 Answers 6

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There is no way for the Ethereum Foundation to reset your password, but some enterprising community members have developed tools to assist with the password recovery process.

If you are familiar with Python (or willing to learn some basics), the best tool so far is a particular version of pyethrecover. Let us suppose that you know part of your password, but can't remember all of it (or perhaps you put in a typo during the presale or when you created the wallet). You can easily input the parts of the password you remember, and then add possible characters to check for those parts of the password you've forgotten. The program will then check all permutations of that possible password space to see if any combination unlocks your wallet. This is a lot easier than manually typing every possibility.

I've also saved a screen shot of the original presale page in case that helps jog your memory. enter image description here

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pyethrecover is well documented,

This is a tool for those of you who've somehow lost your Ethereum wallet password.

pyethrecover is a library for brute forcing your wallet with a list of passwords you generally use.

Means you will have to create a text file with possible passwords and run the pyethrecover script to check each password against your wallet.

Steps

  1. Your wallet must be exported in a .json file and name it ethereum-wallet.json
  2. Create a file named passwords.txt and fill it with your usual passwords, 1 per line
  3. Run the script ./pyethrecover.py -w ethereum-wallet.json -f passwords.txt

It will only work, if your password exists in passwords.txt file

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5

I would like to share my experience.

I had forgotten my passphrase for my presale wallet, and was spending months to develop multiple passphrases to unlock it to no avail.

I checked a couple of websites to look for solutions, and found walletrecoveryservices.com. Dave is a trustworthy person who somehow managed to retrieve my passphrase within a day.

He truly deserved the 20% commission for the great work he has done.

Hope this is useful to you.

Best Rgds Clarence

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  • Welcome! Please repost if you'd like when you have more reputation.
    – eth ♦
    Commented May 12, 2016 at 18:12
  • Since Dave and walletrecoveryservices.com maintain a positive reputation, I think we can leave this post as-is. If anyone disagrees, please escalate this discussion on meta.
    – q9f
    Commented May 12, 2016 at 19:58
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There's no way to recover it, since you are the only person who had it and the wallet is now encrypted.

However, you can try brute-forcing it using variations in your favorite passwords, by using this tool.

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No. The password is more like part of the cryptographic key or a passphrase where if you lose it, all gone.

Any password reset / recovery relies on centralization. (Who is the one that resets your password? Why do you trust them?) On an already centralized system like a web site, you have to trust them anyway. (Yes, Facebook can and does read your posts and private messages.) On a decentralized system like Ethereum, adding in centralized components like this would be a weakness.

Your best bet is to look at the requirements and see if that helps: Must have 10+ characters, upper and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols

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You might want to consider using Hashcat. It is a very powerful tool for cracking passwords and it is opensource. It also has Ethereum Pre-Sale Wallet mode.

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