Software

How to Recover Your Android Keystore Password

Android Keystore Password Recovery

Losing your Android keystore password is unfortunate. Well, there are several ways you can use to for Android keystore recovery. Though it is difficult to assert the most precise and perfect method, much depends on the part of password you remember. Luckily many smart password cracking tools are available to help the developers to recover keystore.

The Android keystore stores cryptographic keys to make their extraction difficult. The Android keystore provider uses the keystore system. While uploading or publishing a new application, you might not remember or find the password. This security feature is hard to crack but not impossible. Find the most popular ways used by the developers to resolve this recovery process.

Recovering Android Keystore with Android Studio

You can recover your keystore password through the idea.log files. The log files are generated by Android Studio. If you are using OS system X version, you can locate these files in -~/Library/Logs/AndroidStudio2.0.

Another way of finding log files is to open Android Studio and visit the Help section. Under the Help section use the option of Show Log in Finder.

Using the search option, you will find multiple idea.log files. Search all the log files for your password. Searching using the term Pandroid.injected.signing.key.password.  You will find the keystore password.

Bruteforce Attack for Android Keystore Password Recovery

Bruteforce Attack is a popular tool for cracking passwords. Download the tool and run it. If you have along password, this tool is quite useful.

Use the below command line to run the tool.

java -jar Android Keystore Brute_v1.06.jar -m 1 -k “C:\\mykeystore.keystore” –start

Bruteforce attack is considered to be one of the most efficient password recovery tools. It uses a variety of combinations of passwords from the given search.

Smart Wordlist Attack

Here is yet another tool to crack your keystore password. Get the tool and search for all the probable passwords. Create a list of all the possible passwords and save it in the hints.txt file. Run the tool using the below command line.

java -jar AndroidKeystoreBrute_v1.06.jar -m 3 -k “C:\\mykeystore.keystore” -d “hints.txt”

Using Dictionary Attack

Unlike bruteforce, dictionary attack tried to retrieve the password from a provided wordlist or dictionary.

Download the tool and create a list of probable passwords. Save the list of possible passwords in a file named dictionary.txt.

Run the tool using command line –

java -jar AndroidKeystoreBrute_v1.06.jar -m 2 -k “C:\\mykeystore.keystore” -d “dictionary.txt”

The dictionary attack also features a filters option. This allows you to skip or include the words that contain and does not contain at minimum one character from the entered characters.

Bruteforce and Smart wordlist tools are quite popular among the programmers for retrieving the passwords.

If you are unable to recover the password, the only option is to use a new key and resubmit your application. You can unpublish your existing app. A new version of the app can be created with the same description and title. Hence it is always advisable to preserve your passwords in a safe location to avoid unproductive exercises. If you know any other way of recovering keystore password, do share with us.

If you are searching for Android Keystore Password Recovery then your search ends here!

Gaurav Tank

CEO at Thanksweb, Author at Buzz9studio