Cracking my keepassxc password

Attempt 1: john the ripper and hashcat

I tried following the tutorial here but:

1. john the ripper does not work on keepassxc’s kdbx files
2. hashcat does not work on my laptop with no gpu

attempt 1.5: custom python script

I then tried writing my own python script but got caught up on making the generic leet transformation function and gave up on the whole project for a while

attempt 2: keepass-simple-crack-kit + HashcatRulesEngine

My new attempt was using keepass-simple-crack-kit and HashcatRulesEngine.

problems: 1) keepass-simple-crack-kit was broken because the opening code failed, looks like this can’t handle keepassxc’s kdbx files either 2) I didn’t see a way to only replace individual characters with hashcatrulesengine. for example I wanted to change only a single l in hello, but I couldn’t come up with a rule, kept getting he11o

attempt 3: custom scripts part 2

Finally went back to my own custom scripts with the previous expreiences, I decided on a more hollistic approach of rule engines as files piping into eachother. I developed two rules, replace-combinations which just replaces any instace of one character with another (does not deal with multiple characters nor replacing multiple at the same time) rules/replace-combinations:

#!/usr/bin/env python3
# vim: set fileencoding=utf-8 :

from sys import argv, stdin

import re


def replacenth(string, sub, wanted, n):
    pattern = re.compile(sub)
    where = [m for m in pattern.finditer(string)][n-1]
    before = string[:where.start()]
    after = string[where.end():]
    newString = before + wanted + after

    return newString


from_char = argv[1]
to_char = argv[2]

for line in stdin:
    line = line.strip()
    print(line)
    for i in range(line.count(from_char)):
        print(replacenth(line, from_char, to_char, i))

And also a leet file just for helpin rules/leet:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

./rules/replace-combinations e 3 | ./rules/replace-combinations i 1 | ./rules/replace-combinations o 0

to generate the word list:

cat password.file  | ./rules/replace-combinations i e | ./rules/replace-combinations E e | ./rules/replace-combinations E '#' | ./rules/leet.sh  | sort -u | ./rules/replace-combinations n N | ./rules/replace-combinations r R > word.list

and finally, to replace keepass-simple-crack-kit:

$ for line in $(cat word.list); do keepassxc-cli open password.kdbx <<< "$line" |& grep Error || echo "$line" ; done | grep -v Error

Very homebrew, but it got the job done after a bit.

My word count was at 1000 words and it took a few minutes to find the right one.