Apple processing power help
Discussion
Hi,
Help! - I have managed to cause myself a massive issue in trying to help with my wife's iPhone on which the Face ID was playing up. Apple help said back up phone, fully wipe and reinstall the back up which I did by backing up to my Mac. Encrypted back up was not selected however it has added a password to the file which I can't now access which has all her pictures on it and other data!! Seems a wide problem and the password can be anything from current, years ago or seemingly random combinations.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3091672
I'm running some software which is trying to guess the password by going through all combinations but this has slowed massively - currently at and pretty quickly got up to 2,004,241,525,570,464,000 (seriously) combinations but has now slowed to less than 100k a day and the pc has been running for over 3 weeks, fan always on as hot etc. I have a separate piece of software that I can keep trying passwords I know she has but this has also not worked.
My thought is to either rent a more powerful Mac - looked at a new Mac Pro but 500 a week plus VAT to rent, do I buy a new MacBook Pro as mine is not M1 chip - does anyone have any other ideas / suggestions or know where you can rent processing time that I could use for this?
Thanks in advance. I realise that if it had been backed up to iCloud it would be fine but I'm well past the possibility of doing that.
Help! - I have managed to cause myself a massive issue in trying to help with my wife's iPhone on which the Face ID was playing up. Apple help said back up phone, fully wipe and reinstall the back up which I did by backing up to my Mac. Encrypted back up was not selected however it has added a password to the file which I can't now access which has all her pictures on it and other data!! Seems a wide problem and the password can be anything from current, years ago or seemingly random combinations.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3091672
I'm running some software which is trying to guess the password by going through all combinations but this has slowed massively - currently at and pretty quickly got up to 2,004,241,525,570,464,000 (seriously) combinations but has now slowed to less than 100k a day and the pc has been running for over 3 weeks, fan always on as hot etc. I have a separate piece of software that I can keep trying passwords I know she has but this has also not worked.
My thought is to either rent a more powerful Mac - looked at a new Mac Pro but 500 a week plus VAT to rent, do I buy a new MacBook Pro as mine is not M1 chip - does anyone have any other ideas / suggestions or know where you can rent processing time that I could use for this?
Thanks in advance. I realise that if it had been backed up to iCloud it would be fine but I'm well past the possibility of doing that.
I know very little about Macs but this looks cheaper than £500/week.
https://www.macincloud.com/pages/dedicated.html
https://www.macincloud.com/pages/dedicated.html
Pintofbest said:
It didn't do that, and as per the Apple forum link - 17.5k people with the same issue. I only did it a few weeks ago but at no point was encryption selected nor did it ask for a password.
Encryption-on is the default setting, so you'd have had to click the option to disable it...did you do this?I've done it in the past and accidentally put in my admin/user password instead of something else, and then spent a few hours going through all the possible passwords I could have used.
I now use iMazing to do the transfers/backups when I get a new machine, as I can copy my ebooks over much easier than using Apple's offering.
QuartzDad said:
I know very little about Macs but this looks cheaper than £500/week.
https://www.macincloud.com/pages/dedicated.html
Thanks - will look in to this as an option.https://www.macincloud.com/pages/dedicated.html
I don't want to be a real t
t, however that's how I'll come across....sorry...
Unless the photos are absolutely (and I mean ABSOLUTELY) mission critical, it just isn't worth it!
Face it, if there of your parents, your kids will not look after them, if there of you, they'll keep a few and delete the rest, if there of the kids they'll keep even less.
Sad fact of life is that we take far, far too many in some bizarre thought they'll be around forever.
I'd collect together the ones she has elsewhere, facebook, icloud, snapchat etc. get them printed into a photobook, stick that in the knicker drawer and repeat every couple of years!
They're gone.
t, however that's how I'll come across....sorry...Unless the photos are absolutely (and I mean ABSOLUTELY) mission critical, it just isn't worth it!
Face it, if there of your parents, your kids will not look after them, if there of you, they'll keep a few and delete the rest, if there of the kids they'll keep even less.
Sad fact of life is that we take far, far too many in some bizarre thought they'll be around forever.
I'd collect together the ones she has elsewhere, facebook, icloud, snapchat etc. get them printed into a photobook, stick that in the knicker drawer and repeat every couple of years!
They're gone.
I'm not sure it's possible to crack an iphone with a password guesser, without the use of a super computer or some such. I think the maths suggest you'll run out of memory / time in order to do this - I could be wrong, but I'd be worried if apple encrypted backups could be cracked by a few weeks on a new mac....
Reading those forum posts, the latest entry is over 3 years old - suggestion this issue seems to have been rectified.
Without suggesting things like trying your mac admin password etc. I think you may have to give up.... It's highly unlikely the password is something random, rather it'll be tied to *something else but between the number of passwords and iTunes / Mac etc. etc. then it can be hard to remember / guess what it could be.
Reading those forum posts, the latest entry is over 3 years old - suggestion this issue seems to have been rectified.
Without suggesting things like trying your mac admin password etc. I think you may have to give up.... It's highly unlikely the password is something random, rather it'll be tied to *something else but between the number of passwords and iTunes / Mac etc. etc. then it can be hard to remember / guess what it could be.
toohuge said:
I'm not sure it's possible to crack an iphone with a password guesser, without the use of a super computer or some such. I think the maths suggest you'll run out of memory / time in order to do this - I could be wrong, but I'd be worried if apple encrypted backups could be cracked by a few weeks on a new mac....
Reading those forum posts, the latest entry is over 3 years old - suggestion this issue seems to have been rectified.
Without suggesting things like trying your mac admin password etc. I think you may have to give up.... It's highly unlikely the password is something random, rather it'll be tied to *something else but between the number of passwords and iTunes / Mac etc. etc. then it can be hard to remember / guess what it could be.
I agree with this. I have to get into phones for work and use a combination of different techniques but generally centre around GrayKey as the starting point. GrayKey is specifically designed to unlock and extract data from locked devices and it does it very well. That said I have an iPhone 12 next door on GrayKey which has been on there for over 9 months and the passwords are still going in. I highly doubt that any Mac would be a match for a stand alone solution but I haven't done the maths to support that, you seem to be doing a very impressive job as it is.Reading those forum posts, the latest entry is over 3 years old - suggestion this issue seems to have been rectified.
Without suggesting things like trying your mac admin password etc. I think you may have to give up.... It's highly unlikely the password is something random, rather it'll be tied to *something else but between the number of passwords and iTunes / Mac etc. etc. then it can be hard to remember / guess what it could be.
Would it be worth trying a fresh install from iCloud on a new device? I appreciate you wouldn't be using the full encrypted file you have but another recent backup from the cloud can't be far off and would recover a lot of the data assuming the device was set to backup to the cloud nightly.
Thanks for all the answers so far - really helpful. I'll have another go at reinstalling - maybe on a different device - and also leave it running for now. Frustration is it got very high then slowed - think the above number I quoted in terms of tries gets in to the 8 character long range but only early.
Not sure how much money you are willing to spend, or if it will even work for your scenario, but on AWS, Azure and GCP, you can spin up very serious clusters and GPU’s.
https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/machine-type...
So on Google, you can spin up a M2 cluster with 12TB memory and 416vCPU’s (I think 1 vCPU is a hyperthreaded CPU core, so 208 CPU cores in total, don’t quote me on this).
I read password cracking was best done on GPU’s because they have so many cores? Can spin up a lot of them on cloud clusters!
If I were in your shoes, I’d be researching cloud computing options first. Doing it at home, even on a powerful desktop machine sounds slow and tedious.
Curious why the phone wasn’t backed up to the cloud? Phone could die, get stolen etc and your data, apps and settings will download to a new one in minutes on a fast connection. Or in this case, the restore would have been seamless. Well worth paying the small amount Apple asks per month for the convenience and the peace of mind.
https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/machine-type...
So on Google, you can spin up a M2 cluster with 12TB memory and 416vCPU’s (I think 1 vCPU is a hyperthreaded CPU core, so 208 CPU cores in total, don’t quote me on this).
I read password cracking was best done on GPU’s because they have so many cores? Can spin up a lot of them on cloud clusters!
If I were in your shoes, I’d be researching cloud computing options first. Doing it at home, even on a powerful desktop machine sounds slow and tedious.
Curious why the phone wasn’t backed up to the cloud? Phone could die, get stolen etc and your data, apps and settings will download to a new one in minutes on a fast connection. Or in this case, the restore would have been seamless. Well worth paying the small amount Apple asks per month for the convenience and the peace of mind.
Edited by anonymous-user on Tuesday 8th February 21:29
Sounds like what ever you are doing is trying to brute force a hash
The first several quadrillions are easy, they're precomputed with rainbow tables, so it is basically a few lookups in a sorted list, then it starts having to try manually, on dedicated GPU hardware that could take weeks / months for 8-9 characters, years for anything longer.
No Mac is going to cut it
The first several quadrillions are easy, they're precomputed with rainbow tables, so it is basically a few lookups in a sorted list, then it starts having to try manually, on dedicated GPU hardware that could take weeks / months for 8-9 characters, years for anything longer.
No Mac is going to cut it
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