iPhones and iPads enable users to password protect their backups, and when they choose to do this their data is secured in an encrypted backup.

1. Encrypted Dmg Not Asking For Password Windows 7
2. Encrypted Dmg Not Asking For Password Windows 10

Practically, this will bring you absolutely nowhere, unless the.dmg was encrypted with an extremely naive password (like 'admin' or '1234'). Unfortunately, based on your description of the passwords: I don't know the first 38 characters but I do know what they might be (a-z, A-Z, / and ).

What is an iPhone backup password?

An iPhone or iPad backup password — sometimes called an iTunes backup password — is set when backing up your iOS device in an encrypted format. The password is securely stored on your device, so that whenever it is called upon to produce a backup, it will generate an encrypted one.

When you choose to protect your backup, you'll need to remember your backup password to ever access that backup's contents. This password is set separately from your iPhone's passcode or your Apple ID's password. So whilst you may set the password to anything you like, resetting your Apple ID won't help you recover it.

What is an iPhone backup password needed for?

Your backup password is needed to read or restore from your iPhone backup, or to remove your iPhone's backup password.

It is not needed to create more backups, to access your iCloud or Apple Music data, to add new devices to your account, or to reset your device.

Over the years Apple have used a few different formats for protecting their encrypted backups. The last big change was made as part of the iOS 10.2 release. iPhone Backup Extractor fully supports all versions of encrypted iTunes backups, as well as iOS backups made by any other software.

Should I password protect my backups?

Setting a password on an iPhone or iPad backup is a great idea, as it helps to protect your data. As the backup is more secure, it means the device can safely include more data in the backup, including health data, which would otherwise be left out. That's handy for you if you ever need to restore from the backup.

How to reset your backup password and create a new backup

If you forget your backup password but don't need access to your backup's contents, you can overwrite it with a new backup:

1. On your iOS device, go to Settings → General → Reset.
2. Tap Reset All Settings and enter your iOS passcode.
3. Follow the steps to reset your settings. This won't affect your user data or passwords, but it will reset settings like display brightness, Home screen layout, and wallpaper. It also removes your encrypted backup password.
4. Connect your device to iTunes again and create a new encrypted backup.

Be aware that this will overwrite any pre-existing iPhone backup you might have, and all data included in them.

How to recover a lost iPhone backup password

If you've lost or forgotten your iTunes backup password, there are a few techniques you can use to try to recover it.

1. Try known passwords

First, it's worth trying a bunch of passwords that you might have used. There's no penalty to trying a number of different passwords in iTunes, although each check can take a little while. There's no such thing as a default password for an iOS backup.

Perhaps you used one of the following:

• Your iTunes, Apple ID or iPhone password
• Your email password
• Your computer's login password
• Something simple like password, 1234, letmein, 0000, or so on.

Does Apple sometimes automatically choose a backup password?

We often hear from people who have lost their password, claiming their iPhone must have automatically set an unknown password for them. In over ten years — and 1,000+ successful recoveries — we've never once uncovered a password that was truly unknown to the user.

The past is a foreign country. They choose passwords differently there.

Passwords are set on the device, not by your computer. If your device was bought or configured by somebody else, it's possible that you need to ask them for the password.

2. Check the macOS keychain

If you use a Mac and configured the iTunes backup password on that Mac, your computer may have kept a record of the password in its keychain.

You can check this by loading the 'Keychain Access' app that comes with every Mac.

1. Launch Keychain Access by opening Spotlight with ⌘ Cmd + (space), typing 'Keychain Access', and then hitting ⏎ Enter.
2. Click 'Passwords' in the left-hand category sidebar.
3. Type 'backup' into the search box in the top-right of the window.
4. View the saved password entries by double-clicking on results named iOS Backup or iPhone Backup.
5. Check the 'Show password' box and the password will be displayed.

Unfortunately, there's no simple equivalent of doing this for Windows users.

3. Backup to iCloud, erase the device and restore

There's also a nuclear technique for removing an iTunes backup password setting from your device. Enable iCloud backups under settings, back it up, then erase and restore it.

This process is long-winded -- especially for users with a lot of data or a slower connection -- and ideally avoided. You can see our guide to making an iCloud backup to follow this approach.

4. Brute-force the backup password

Apple provide technical details on how encrypted backups work. Simply put, modern iOS backups use AES-256, with 10,000,000 iterations. That makes checking a single password slow enough, even if it's the right password. Trying many different passwords with a tool like hashcat is a very slow process. Users can export a hash from their backup for use in hashcat with our free rictl tool with the following command:

Assuming the password had 8 digits, limited to only upper or lower-case English letters or numbers — and no punctuation symbols — there would be 218,340,105,584,896 (62⁸) possible combinations.

Using a $1,300 GeForce 1080 Ti GPU, it would be possible to try around 100 passwords per second, which would mean it would be possible to break that password in around 69,000 years. That's substantially before the heat death of the universe, but it's still a long way away. The process could be sped up with a machine with 4x $5,000 Nvidia K80 GPUs, but even with a 10x improvement it would still take around ten thousand years, and the electricity consumption would be enormous.

Earlier versions of iOS created backups with much weaker encryption, as below:

Thus, from a practical perspective, it can be possible to recover a password if one has a general idea about its form, such that a few hundred or thousand guesses would find it.

How to speed up password recovery with an ASIC or quantum computer

You might ask, what about quantum computers, or dedicated hardware? Let's take a look.

You might be curious about working with a university with access to quantum computing resources. Whilst there are quite a few click-bait articles out there on the amazing powers of the technology, it doesn't make cracking strong encryption much easier.

There are two good resources on this: this sober paper (nicely summarised by The Register: 'Grover's algorithm would need about 10³² years to crack SHA-256'). Then there's this, less sober article, which suggests that even if one were to build a Dyson sphere and capture all of the energy radiated by the sun it might still be hard. 🤷‍♂️

There's another approach that might be faster than general quantum, and that's using an ASIC. This is essentially a custom piece of hardware that is designed specifically for the encryption algorithm one wants to break. Whilst it sounds like everything either uses SHA-1 or SHA-256, the reality is that the parameters used with the encryption matter, which from a practical perspective means you'd need to get one made for the iPhone backup algorithm, rather than being able to use a generalised device. In this case, an iPhone backup uses 10,000,000 iterations of SHA-256. You could probably get a good ASIC built for under $100k, but how much faster it'd be is hard to say. Even if it were 10,000 times faster (it wouldn't be!) it would still be too slow.

The problem ultimately is that even if recovery is worth $250k, the cost of nailing a decent password is substantially greater. Few people have the appetite for the equivalent of a mortgage on an attempt with at best a fraction of percent chance of success in their lifetime.

Given how brutal the brute force probabilities are, that points to using a structured process to recover or trigger memories of a lost password. If the value of recovery is great enough, we'd recommend a process like this:

Freezing all your data to prevent accidental overwrites, deletions or modifications

• Buy new hard-disks for your computers, then pull out every disk and USB stick out of every device you own (computers, laptops, Time Machine devices) and quarantine them
• Replace your mobile devices with new ones and quarantine your current devices
• Dump and archive every online storage system you use (eg. Google Drive, Dropbox, iCloud Drive)

Triggering memory responses

• Look back at photos from the time, visualising the equipment and environment you had
• Use iPhone Backup Extractor to examine your messages histories from the time to see who you were talking to at the time and what you were was talking about

Intensively search for potential password variants

• Dump all macOS, iOS and Google keychain passwords and feed them into a password list
• Dump all passwords from your password managers and feed them into a password list
• Scan all of the archived disks and USB sticks for any form of file that could have been a password archive or a message, photo or note entry that might be a memory trigger
• Run a painstaking sector-by-sector testdisk scan on your disks and device images for deleted data

5. If in doubt: reach out

Our support team are able to help customers with recovery of lost passwords in some cases. Please do reach out to us using the support details below.

On Windows, you have Bitlocker. Cross-platform, you also have VeraCrypt (successor to TrueCrypt). But if you want to encrypt afolder on the fly in MacOS, then the quickest and easiest way is to use DiskUtility.

Disk Utility is a function built into the MacOS operatingsystem and can do things such as wiping and formattingmacOS hard-drivesand removable media such as USB sticks. But it can also take a folder on aMacOS and encrypt it using the DMG format.

The DMG Format

If the DMG format sounds familiar to you then that’s probablybecause that is also the standard file format for MacOS software installationfiles. DMG files are mountable disk images which compress the files insidethem, much the same way a Zip file compresses Windows files in a folder.

As well as compressing files, DMG can also encrypt them.Here’s how.

Making An Encrypted Folder In Disk Utility

Make a new folder on your computer and put all the files youwant to encrypt into that folder.

Now open Disk Utility which you will find by going toApplications–>Utilities.

Go to the menu at the top and choose File–>NewImage–>Image From Folder.

Now navigate to the location of your folder of secret files,which in my case is on the desktop. Highlight the folder and click “Choose”.

In the box that pops up, confirm the following :

• Thefile name for the encrypted folder.
• Whereyou want it saved.
• Thestandard of encryption (128-bit is generally sufficient).
• Set“Image Format” to “Read/Write”.

When you set the encryption standard, a password box will popup asking you to enter your desired password.

If you already have a desired password, type it in twice andclick “Choose”. However, if you are not sure of your password, the little blackkey icon next to the “Verify” box is a Password Assistant. Click the key toopen it.

Drop the menu down and choose what type of password you want.When you do, a password will auto-fill for you in the boxes provided.

You can also specify how long the password will be and theQuality bar will update in real time.

It’s worth pointing out that if you go for a random passwordoption, you are going to need to copy and paste it somewhere to remember it. Orbetter still, use a password manager. The last thing you need is to belocked out of your own encrypted folder.

When you have the password you want, close the PasswordAssistant and you will be back at this window.

Encrypted Dmg Not Asking For Password Windows 7

Click “Save” to begin the encryption process. How long itwill take will depend on how large your encrypted folder is going to be.

When the DMG file has been created, the original unencryptedfolder will still be there. It is not deleted by Disk Utility. So you may wantto delete that folder, but as I said just now, make sure you have a copy of thepassword first. Otherwise you will be permanently locked out.

Encrypted Dmg Not Asking For Password Windows 10

If you go to your newly created encrypted DMG file, anddouble-click on it, it will ask you for your password. Do NOT tick the Keychainoption.