Can't Unlock Any Of My Four Geth-Generated Accounts, 30,000 ETH Inside

[testerguy]

I thought I should edit to include an update right at the top of the body: three of the four Geth accounts have been unlocked thanks to @DcyMatrix's suggestion below

Requesting advice/help in solving this problem:

I created four Geth accounts in late May, and gave each a different password, which I carefully noted down (I wrote the passwords down on paper, then I entered them into the Geth command line).

Yesterday I tried to unlock the accounts, and none of the passwords worked, for any of the accounts. I'm transcribing the passwords from the same piece of paper that I initially read from when entering them into the Geth client, so it's very unlikely that this was an input error.

I've searched the internet and found these four links where people report having similar problems:

Mist Wallet password problem - https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4na19x/mist_wallet_password_problem/

Mist Wallet says wrong password, be careful - https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4jzxft/mist_wallet_says_wrong_password_be_careful/

Mist password wrong error 0.7.6 - ethereum/mist#923

Password Assistance Needed :) - https://forum.ethereum.org/discussion/8422/password-assistance-needed

A common factor in all of these is accounts being created in May, so it may have something to do with a version of Geth that was in wide use in May.

Someone in the discussion linked by the second URL from the top mentioned fixing their problem with Jaxx Kryptokit. I tried importing one of the accounts into the Jaxx Kryptokit wallet:

https://ethereumwallet.com/beta/index.html#dYb9

and put in the password, and it did not work, so I do believe that the password is wrong.

I found this bug report relating to both Mist and Geth:

ethereum/mist#182 (comment)

I'm wondering if this could be related.

I created two new accounts today with two new passwords, and was able to unlock both with their passwords, but I did that with Geth 1.5.0-unstable and the version I was running in late May was different.

If I lose this ETH this would set me back a few years, so I'm very anxious right now. Any help would be appreciated.

Edit, more details:

I was running Geth 1.5.0 unstable, with this snapshot: 1.5.0+986SNAPSHOT20160511110231trusty-0ubuntu1

So this is the snapshot as of May 11th 2016

[DcyMatrix]

Had the same problem, the way I got around it then as får as I recall. Was ro type in the password in a simple text editor, confirm it was typed correctly. Then cope & paste from the editor to the Mist wallet. And it worked for me.

[testerguy]

I imported the keystore into a new machine with Mist, and none of the passwords worked, in any of the ways I tried. I'll try again later tonight/tomorrow and pay attention to use the method you mention.

[DcyMatrix]

As you I tried multiple times to type it in, I am guessing that the copy & paste method from a simple text editor fixes the problem because for some reason the keyboard input is just not always correct in the terminal.

[DcyMatrix]

Good luck! Let the rest of us know if it's a viable workaround in your case as well 👍

[testerguy]

Thanks. If I get it working I'll be sure to update everyone.

[testerguy]

I don't know how to message people on Github. Do I just mention them? @hiddentao, do you have any idea if the carriage return bug you mention here:

ethereum/mist#182 (comment)

could have affected passphrase entry during account creation in Geth?

@teasider and @DavidMc0, were you able to solve your locked account problems?

[fjl]

@testerguy That's definitely a possibility. I'll try to build a workaround/test version on Monday that unlocks with and without the carriage return character appended to the password.

[testerguy]

Thank you @fjl.

[Metatronovich]

@testerguy - I wasnt able to open that wallet. I just saw that bug you were talking about and I hope
@fjl will be able to deliver that version - it might be my problem as well (as I dont have any other passwords than the ones I've written down and use, just like you.)

My password contains one special character with is "!"

Thank you for this topic - Its nice to see more options as I've used out every possible one i could find with google (Except this one with the carriage return character)

[testerguy]

What OS are you running @teasider? Do you know what version of Geth you were running when you created your accounts?

If you want to email me directly, my email address is bashdesher@gmail.com. This goes for anyone else who wants to communicate privately as well.

[Metatronovich]

@testerguy I am (and was) running Windows 7 64bit.

I'm not sure what geth version I was running but the date it was created was around the end of May - and i was always up to date with whatever version was out.

[testerguy]

Ok. Also should be noted that windows uses \r\n for carriage return, whereas OSX and Linux (which I'm on) use \n. It would be nice if we could somehow reproduce the bug with the version of Geth we were running at the time.

[Metatronovich]

I also have to add that I've made around 4-5 wallets at that time, all with the same password - and its just this one wallet that doesn't seems to work.

I've never used any other passwords, I tried using a password variation tool which gives back a list of "possible typing mistakes" (one or two letters for each character) - which didn't work either (that was about 50 hours of brute forcing with that list)

So this error you just wrote about might be my last chance, Hope we figure it out for your fund's sake and mine.

[DavidMc0]

@testerguy I haven't been able to resolve my issue yet.

I'm running on Windows 10 64 bit.

I also have special characters in my passwords, sometime including "!"

I'll be away for a couple of weeks, but will try to provide any useful information once I'm back, or test any possible fixes.

Best of luck on this everyone!

[Raskal8]

The first geth account I ever created was using linux, back when gpu mining was just beginning, I used the cli command personal.newAccount("passphrase") after I mined a block I checked and my password wasn't recognized. I created a new account with personal.newAccount() and entered my password when prompted and everything worked fine. Not sure if this info helps at all

[testerguy]

@DcyMatrix the method you recommended worked for three of my four accounts!

"Had the same problem, the way I got around it then as får as I recall. Was ro type in the password in a simple text editor, confirm it was typed correctly. Then cope & paste from the editor to the Mist wallet. And it worked for me."

@DavidMc0 I recommend you try this as well.

[Metatronovich]

Thanks, Tried it but with no luck. (one of the first things i've tried)

[DavidMc0]

thanks, and very glad to hear that this worked for 3 of your accounts!

I also tried this with Notepad in Windows 10 & no luck for me.

On 14 Aug 2016 19:16, "testerguy" notifications@github.com wrote:

@DcyMatrix https://github.com/DcyMatrix the method you recommended
worked for three of my four accounts!

"Had the same problem, the way I got around it then as får as I recall.
Was ro type in the password in a simple text editor, confirm it was typed
correctly. Then cope & paste from the editor to the Mist wallet. And it
worked for me."

@teasider https://github.com/teasider @DavidMc0
https://github.com/DavidMc0 I recommend you try this as well.

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[testerguy]

@teasider, I recommend try it once more, making sure that Mist is synced up before you do. Mist has(had?) a bug where any send error would output the 'wrong password' message, so there's a possibility that your transaction was failing for other reasons, and it was incorrectly reporting to you the cause as a 'wrong password'. It's a long shot, but you need to eliminate all of the long shot possibilities.

@DavidMc0 thanks!

[dbfrav]

Hello all - I've had this precise issue for over a month having created issue #982. @DcyMatrix , I wish I could try your suggestion of copy/pasting from a text editor but my Ethereum Base wallet won't allow a Paste function. It won't even accept a Paste of an Ether address so I have to type in everything. I'm unable to Paste.

As mentioned, I've been dealing with this for over a month as my Issue has now basically gone cold with no further user advice so this thread is breathing new hope for me.

[testerguy]

@dbfrav you can copy your private keys to a different wallet. All wallets have a keystore directory which can be migrated between them. I recommend spending a couple of hours researching how to do migrations and backups of wallet keystores.

[hiddentao]

@testerguy Account creation in Geth should (as far as I'm aware) not be affected by the carriage return issue you're referring to. Plus that issue was about when you wanted to unlock the account from within Mist/Wallet.

[DcyMatrix]

@testerguy Awesome! :-D

To people having problems copy & pasting the password try and see if you
might be able to select the password in the simple text editor and then
drag the password to the password input box in your wallet. :-)

Den man. 15. aug. 2016 09.31 skrev Ramesh Nair notifications@github.com:

@testerguy https://github.com/testerguy Account creation in Geth should
(as far as I'm aware) not be affected by the carriage return issue you're
referring to. Plus that issue was about when you wanted to unlock the
account from within Mist/Wallet.

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[dbfrav]

@testerguy - I'm familiar with migration of keyfiles to different wallets and have already done so, having migrated my keyfiles to different wallets on different computers. Unfortunately, this did not solve the issue for me.

@DcyMatrix - As stated above I was not able to copy & paste my password int the wallet or even a wallet address, but thanks to your suggestion of drag and drop, I was able to do both but this did not unlock the wallet.

[shawkhawk]

I am also having a password problem with an account I created back in September 2015 from the command line. It isn't accepting any password I try.

I've created accounts (from Ethereum-Wallet) in May and June of this year and those work fine.

I've tried all the solutions recommended above but none of them have worked.

I've copy/pasted the password from a plain text editor into Ethereum-Wallet.
I've tried to unlock the account using the --unlock flag in the command line and starting geth manually.

Anything else I can try?

[testerguy]

If I may make a suggestion to Geth developers:

It would be very helpful if, during account creation, Geth displayed the password after the user has inputted it twice, and gave an option to print it. It would at the very least establish whether a password problem is due to human error or software bug. Right now, in cases like mine, there is no way to be certain whether a user made a mistake when creating their password, and are simply inputting the wrong one when attempting to decrypt, or if there was some software error during account creation.

Does the Geth client currently test to see if the inputted password is able to decrypt a newly created account before validating that account creation was successful?

@hiddentao thanks for the info. Any recommendations on what to do at this point? I'm fairly certain I didn't input the wrong password, as I wrote it down, twice, before entering it into the terminal. I would have had to misread the password from the piece of paper, to make the same typo, twice, in order to create the account with a password different from what I have written down.

[DcyMatrix]

To anyone having problems with the password not unlocking their wallet. Try
to see if using https://www.myetherwallet.com might be able to accept the
password.

On Thu, Aug 18, 2016, 03:25 testerguy notifications@github.com wrote:

If I may make a suggestion to Geth developers:

It would be very helpful if, during account creation, Geth displayed the
password after the user has inputted it twice, and gave an option to print
it. It would at the very least establish whether a password problem is due
to human error or software bug. Right now, in cases like mine, there is no
way to be certain whether a user made a mistake when creating their
password, and are simply inputting the wrong one when attempting to
decrypt, or if there was some software error during account creation.

@hiddentao https://github.com/hiddentao thanks for the info. Any
recommendations on what to do at this point? I'm fairly certain I didn't
input the wrong password, as I wrote it down, twice, before entering it
into the terminal. I would have had to misread the password from the piece
of paper, to make the same typo, twice, in order to create the account with
a password different from what I have written down.

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[hiddentao]

@testerguy I'm really not sure to be honest. Based on what
@shawkhawk it's possible that older versions of the clients were not handling all passwords correctly, e.g. especially if certain symbols were being used. But it's really hard to say at this point what the cause may be.

[FireAndTheVoid]

@Freakingcat I would still like to help. Some details might help, though.

1. I saw in an above post that you are using a Mac. What version of OSX were you running when you installed Mist? Have you upgraded to a newer version of OSX since then?

2. You also mentioned that you were using the latest version of Mist in the March 2016 time frame. In March 2016, it looks like the latest version of Mist was Wallet 0.5.2 (Beta 10) (I'm referencing https://github.com/ethereum/mist/releases?after=0.7.1). Does this sound like the version you used?

3. When you installed Mist, did you download the pre-built version or did you download the source and build it yourself?

4. Did you upgrade the Mist wallet software between the time you successfully executed a smart contract and the time you first received the "wrong password" error? If so, what version of Mist did you upgrade to?

5. Roughly how long is your password? What special characters are included? Important: I don't need the actual password, just an approximate length and the special characters, i.e. #$?!, in no particular order.

If you would rather not discuss the details in this forum, send me an e-mail at fir3andth3void@gmail.com.

Also, although I've never used Mist myself, it should't be necessary to sync with the network in order to check if your password works. At least with geth, I am certain that it isn't necessary.

[Freakingcat]

Thanks a lot @FireAndTheVoid - I will send you an email in the next hours!

[dbfrav]

@FireAndTheVoid , this didn't work for me either, but thanks for your efforts.

[FireAndTheVoid]

@dbfrav If you want some help trying to unlock your account, send me an e-mail at fir3andth3void@gmail.com. I'm still working with @Freakingcat to unlock his account, but I was successful in helping another person in the forums to get into theirs.

[ethtester]

@FireAndTheVoid what tools are you using for password testing? ethcrack, hashcat or JTR? if so what is your hash rate?

[FireAndTheVoid]

@ethtester I am a software developer and I have mostly developed my own tools. My tools are based on web3j (https://github.com/web3j/web3j) which uses the lambdaWorks-OSS Google Group's implementation of scrypt (https://github.com/wg/scrypt). On an typical 2-3 GHz Intel CPU, it completes a hash in around 0.6-0.7 seconds. I run it multi-threaded on one or more of my server-grade workstation computers. Currently, the number of threads I run is limited by the amount of memory on the systems (I am not CPU limited). With each instance consuming around 6+ GB of memory, my workstations can only run around 6-7 instances simultaneously. I'm considering buying more RAM, which would allow me to process double or triple the number of password combinations in the same amount of time. But with my current setup, on a single workstation, I am processing around 10 passwords a second.

What kind of hash rates are you seeing? What tools have you tried?

[ethtester]

I'm using hashcat 3.6.0 with a quad core CPU, seeing about 10/12 H/s. On another workstation with 2 Xeon processors with total 16 cores I see 25 H/s.

[FireAndTheVoid]

Wow, I will have to look into hashcat. You aren't memory limited on the Xeon box?

[ethtester]

According to a hashcat dev each iteration uses 250MB of memory. This is why we cannot crack on Scrypt on GPU's. The best GPU's today only have about 16GB of ram, not enough to use all the 2000+ GPU cores simultaneously... So my workstations with 32GB are not memory limited when working with only 4 / 16 cores

[evertonfraga]

Cross-referencing ethereum/mist#3513.

[anormore]

Hi there, like you I'm locked out. I've been using Hashcat a lot recently, but there is actually little point at the moment, please see this guys thread:

https://hashcat.net/forum/thread-7181-post-38590.html#pid38590

Essentially, we need to determine in the Eth wallet is being generated incorrectly. No amount of GPU cracking in the world will guess it correct if the hash value of the wallet is incorrect! Good luck, stay with us.

[jeycreative]

Hello world, I'm joining the club too.
Here is my data : Several wallets created on OS X in march 2016 using the ether wallet app.
My keyboard is set on Swiss French "qwertz" same for the system.
Some passwords were using "!" at the end too. might be a strong clue there.
Have recovered one of 4 wallet using one of my noted password 10 char in low caps without "!" at the end. For the others I'm using hashcat but it will take looooong time...
Have anyone used a password using a double exclamation point at the end (!!) and might suffer the same problem ? it might help to know. Good Luck & computing to you all.

[MatrixManAtYrService]

I stumbled across this issue and it piqued my interest. I'd like some feedback on these thoughts before I try to code something up:

I'm thinking of writing an automated test which creates a wallet using version n, then unlocked it using the latest version. Then I'll write a script that walks along each commit and runs the test. We can rule out any commits where the test passes.

The test could fail for a number of reasons (most of which will be brittle automation), but with any luck we can correlate a password-related code change with a test failure.

From there we ought to be able to rerun the failing test under a microscope and figure out what's going on.

Does this make sense as a test plan? I don't have a Mac, but I can run it on Ubuntu and if I feel like a it's meaningful I can share the code with someone who does.

[evertonfraga]

@MatrixManAtYrService it does make sense, but I'd take a slightly different approach in order to save time/efforts:

1. first, try to reproduce the issue manually. Make sure that a given password does not work at N version so you can write your script.
2. instead of running the tests for each commit, why not try with each version? Once you have a potential ∆ you can talk about commits.

[bigvito19]

Do you mind if I give it a try?

[ViscachaX]

I tried many different methods to recover my Geth account with no success. My final at was attempt was successful and so simple I couldn't believe I made this mistake.

1. Using Window Geth CLI
2. enter geth account unlock 0
3. then simply enter Ctrl+v.

I was only able to get this to work in the Geth CLI. An empty Ctrl+v didn't seem to work in myetherwallet, though.

[adamschmideg]

Regretfully, it's not possible to solve this issue in a technical way. It was opened a long time ago, this is not a single issue anymore.