September 16th, 2015 by Vladimir Katalov
Category: «Elcomsoft News», «General», «Security», «Software», «Tips & Tricks»
  1. Into The Crypt Mac Os X
  2. Into The Crypt Mac Os Download
  3. Into The Crypt Mac Os Catalina

Click on the “Turn On FileVault” button. If more than one user has the account on your Mac, each user will need to key in their password to unlock the disk. The Mac will display a message for this when you activate FileVault. Click the “Enable User” button and enter the user’s password. Full-disk encryption (FDE) is a low-effort way to ensure that if someone were to get ahold of one of your drives while unmounted or a Mac while powered down, the contents on the drive would be.


We have just released a brand new tool, and this time it’s not about mobile forensics. Or is it?

Elcomsoft Password Digger is designed for decrypting the content of Mac OS protected storage, the keychain. For one, it’s a Windows tool, so you’ll need to pull keychain files from the Mac OS system along with any decryption metadata (such as the key file for the system keychain or user’s password for decrypting the user keychain). After decrypting the keychain, we’ll export everything into an XML, and create a filtered plain-text file that only contains passwords (to be used as a pluggable dictionary in various password recovery tools).

So what is this all about?

Mac OS Keychain

It’s about passwords. This time around, we are targeting passwords Mac OS users keep in the Keychain. If you follow our blog, you’ve already head of iOS keychain. In iOS-powered devices such as iPhone and iPad, keychain is used to keep a lot of highly sensitive information. With every major iOS release, Apple seems to move more and more stuff under the umbrella of this encrypted storage.

Dealing with iOS keychains is extremely tough, as those are securely protected by strong, hardware-based encryption keys. When dealing with an iPhone, we can only access decrypted keychain via physical acquisition (jailbreak required, 32-bit devices only) or extract from a password-protected backup. Fortunately, keychain acquisition is much easier for computers running Apple’s desktop OS, Mac OS X.

According to various sources, approximately 4.9 to 6.5 of all desktop and laptop computers are running Mac OS X. The use of Mac OS is on the rise, with more Apple computers sold every year compared to other platforms. In Mac OS, the keychain plays the role of a system-wide, centralized password storage. It’s preinstalled on every system, it’s convenient and extremely simple to use, which makes it the tool of choice for most users. As a result, nearly every password a Mac OS user ever types ends up in the keychain.

What’s In There?

As already mentioned, nearly every password the user ever types ends up in the keychain. After just a few days of using the system, the user may’ve already typed the following passwords:

System Keychain

  • Wi-Fi passwords
  • User Keychain
  • Apple ID password
  • Password to iTunes backups
  • AirPort and TimeCapsule passwords
  • Passwords to Web sites and accounts
  • VPN, RDP, FTP and SSH passwords
  • Passwords to mail accounts including Gmail and Microsoft Exchange
  • Passwords to social networks
  • Passwords to network shares
  • iWork document passwords

That’s a lot of passwords in a single storage! Extracting them can surely help an investigation. However, there is one particular password that can help the most. And that is the user’s Apple ID password.

Apple ID Password: The Goldmine

If you manage to decrypt the keychain and discover the user’s Apple ID and password, you may have just found a goldmine. With Apple ID and password, you may be able to log in to the user’s Apple account to download and analyze over-the-air backups saved by all iOS devices registered to that account. This includes the user’s iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch devices. If you’re lucky and no two-factor authentication is present, you can simply use Elcomsoft Phone Breaker Forensic to download a clean, unencrypted backup that can be viewed in Elcomsoft Phone Viewer or analyzed in one of the many commercial forensic tools.

Building a Custom Dictionary

Another purpose of using Elcomsoft Password Digger is building a custom dictionary containing all of the user’s passwords. As you may know, many types of passwords are just too slow to brute force. For example, even if you use a high-end hardware accelerator, you can only try about 25,000 password combinations per second when attacking documents encrypted with Microsoft Office 2013. That’s not a lot, and rules out attacks on long, complex passwords – unless you have a good dictionary. And what could be more relevant for breaking a strong password than a dictionary containing that user’s other passwords? Elcomsoft Password Digger builds just that: a highly relevant dictionary that contains all passwords stored by the user in the Mac OS keychain.

Even if the dictionary attack doesn’t work right away, there are other helpful options available. By just looking at someone’s passwords you can get an idea on whether they reused a common password among multiple accounts, or had a specific pattern for memorizing their passwords. This information will help building a custom template or mask when performing a brute-force attack.

Using Apple Keychain Access

If you are using a Mac, you can get an idea of what sort of data is stored in the keychain. Just launch Keychain Access, a built-in tool available in every version of Mac OS, and you’ll see the list of passwords along with URLs (or application names), date and time, and other relevant information. When using Keychain Access, you’ll have to type your password every time when opening a new record, so using Keychain Access for an investigation is probably not the best idea.

Requirements to Extract Keychain Data

Into The Crypt Mac OS

In order to use Elcomsoft Password Digger, you’ll need a Windows PC to run the tool, a set of keychain files extracted from the target Mac OS computer, and the user’s authentication information (Mac OS login and password or keychain password, if it’s different). For decrypting the system keychain, you’ll need a decryption key that must be extracted from the Mac OS computer (administrative privileges required).

System Keychain

  • Keychain file extracted from the user’s Mac OS system
  • Decryption key from the same system *
    * The decryption key for system keychain must be extracted; administrative privileges are required if extracting from a live system

User Keychain

  • Keychain file extracted from the user’s Mac OS system
  • User’s local login password or keychain password (if different)

Obtaining Keychain Files

In order to decrypt the keychain with Elcomsoft Password Digger, the first thing you’ll need aside of the ElcomSoft tool is the keychain itself. In Mac OS, keychain is stored in several physical files. Yet another file holds the decryption key for the system keychain. You’ll need all of these in order to gain full access to encrypted information.

If you’re acquiring keychain files from a live Mac OS X system, do the following.

  • Make a new folder on the desktop (e.g. “KEYCHAINS”).
  • Open Terminal and issue the following command:cd Desktop/KEYCHAINS
  • Copy the following files into the current folder ( “KEYCHAINS”):

Into The Crypt Mac Os X

cp /Users/<username>/Library/Keychains/login.keychain .
cp /Library/Keychains/System.keychain .
sudo cp /private/var/db/SystemKey .

Note that you need superuser access in order to extract SystemKey, a file that contains encryption metadata for decrypting system keychain. You’ll be prompted for apassword.Also note there is a final dot at the end of each “copy” command. This is not a formatting error; the dot means that the file is to be copied into the current folder (“KEYCHAINS” in our case).<user name> is the name of the user who’s keychain you are about to extract (currently logged in user is displayed before the “$” sign).

  • Transfer the content of the “KEYCHAINS” folder to the Windows PC where you have Elcomsoft Password Digger installed. When Elcomsoft Password Digger prompts you for keychain location, point it to that folder.

If you have a disk image instead of the live system, extracting files is easier since you won’t need superuser access or admin password. Just mount the disk image and use your favorite file manager to copy the required files to your Windows computer.

Mounting the disk image is normally not a problem. If you’re dealing with a DMG image, Mac OS has built-in tools to mount it. If the disk image is in EnCase .E01 format, you’ll need to use third-party tools to mount the image.

Issues and Obstacles

The keychain is supposed to be secure, yet Elcomsoft Password Digger offers instant decryption. So is there something wrong with keychain security, or are we not telling something?

Well, in fact, there are certain obstacles that can make keychain acquisition and/or decryption difficult of impossible. If, for example, the disk is encrypted with FileVault2, we won’t be able to extract keychain files, so there will be nothing to decrypt.

Another potential issue is attempting to decrypt a user keychain with a missing password. Since Elcomsoft Password Digger requires a password to decrypt the keychain, there’s really nothing the tool can do if the password is not known. At this time, we are working to add the ability to break keychain passwords to Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery; we’ll post immediately when it’s ready.

It’s Getting Better

Elcomsoft Password Digger is still new. Version 1.0 can only accept keychain files copied from a Mac OS X system. This very moment we’re working on building a native Mac OS version of the tool, and adding two alternative ways to acquire keychains:

See the two greyed-out options? The native Mac OS tool will be able to extract keychain files automatically from the current system (if launched on the computer being investigated; administrative password required for extracting decryption key for the system keychain). Both Windows and Mac OS tools will be able to use an offline disk or mounted disk image to automatically locate and extract system and user keychains. The update will be free to those who purchase the initial edition.

Into The Crypt Mac Os Download



10.5: Reset a user's password in single user mode 13 comments Create New Account
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10.5: Reset a user's password in single user mode
This looks like a shorter method than the similar one that Apple describes at
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306840
..which has you first delete, then change, the old password.
10.5: Reset a user's password in single user mode

Hmmm this article does only delete a part of a user's record, the AuthAuthority value, in fact. This article is useful if you have a user created in 10.2.x and migrated in 10.5.
Beginning with 10.3, Apple changed the way passwords are stored for more security. Before 10.3, passwords were stored in the NetInfo database, in the users entries, using the unsecure crypt hash. Starting with 10.3, passwords are using stronger hashes (SHA-1 and beginning with 10.4 a Salted-SHA1) and they are no longer stored in the users entries but in /private/var/db/shadow/hash, in a file which is named with each user's GeneratedUID (not the old unix UID, be careful). This folder is only accessible to root and the AuthAuthority attribute tells the system which kind of password you have.
So, if your user was created before 10.3 and you have migrated it, you may want to do what this KB article explains.

10.5: Reset a user's password in single user mode

The dscl command portion of this hint will work in 10.4 - I just used it to remotely reset admin passwords on several machines via ARD.
Thanks!!!
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0

10.5: Reset a user's password in single user mode

Once you mount the file system, can't you just use passwd <username> ?
Of course neither method will change the user's login keychain password.

10.5: Reset a user's password in single user mode
10.5: Reset a user's password in single user mode
Hi there, I don't think passwd would change the password. The passwd command will change the password in /etc/passwd. But Mac OS X doesn't rely on /etc/passwd for passwords, it relies on Directory Service and you have to use the dscl commande to change things in Directory Service.
10.5: Reset a user's password in single user mode
Into The Crypt Mac OS

passwd will change the user's password in whatever way the system has been set up. Unix systems don't all use /etc/passwd, actually most standalone systems use /etc/shadow not /etc/passwd. Most networked systems use ldap or kerberos or even opendirectory. If passwd has been tailored correctly to the mac it should change the user's password correctly. Maybe not the keychain access password though.
N.B. I haven't tried using passwd in 10.5.

I did just the following after rebooting to single user mode in 10.5 and it worked:

After the next reboot my machine didn't automatically login, even though it is configured to do so, and it prompted me for the keychain password in order join my wireless network, but it did honor the new password and it sounds like you can subsequently reset the password in System Preferences to change the keychain password.
10.5: Reset a user's password in single user mode

You don't have to worry about the Keychain password. Once you change the user's password and can log into the computer all need to do is simply go into the Accounts preference pane and change the password there to either the new password or something different if you so choose. That action will then automatically change the Keychain Password. I've done this several hundred times on Macs from 10.0 through 10.4.11 I haven't yet had to change a password on a Leopard box but I'm sure it will work just the same.
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Tino XIII

10.5: Reset a user's password in single user mode

Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to work with 10.5. I just did this and now can't access the login keychain (OS 10.5.6). Unfortunately, I don't think there's any way around this.

Aside from Open Firmware/EFI passwords, you can configure your Mac so that the root password must be entered in order to access Single User Mode. If your root account is disabled, then it is impossible to enter the root password, and Single User Mode cannot be started.
To do this, the console and ttys must be marked as insecure in /etc/ttys:
1. Log in as administrator
2. Open Terminal
3. cd /etc
4. sudo cp ttys ttys.old (backs up previous ttys config).
5. sudo pico ttys
6. Replace all occurrences of the word 'secure' with 'insecure' at any lines that do not begin with a '#'
7. Exit, saving changes.
These instructions are from the Apple Mac OS X Security Configuration manual.

Into The Crypt Mac Os Catalina

This procedure works except that the password for login.keychain remains lost. What will reset that? Thanks!

10.5: Reset a user's password in single user mode
Check this useful guide Reset mac password without disk