An embarrassing thing happened to me lately: I forgot the password to my PC. The connection between my neurons responsible for keeping it suddenly disappeared. And no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t bring it back.

Of course I make backups, but this time I skipped one and I had some important files that were not copied to my external drive. Normally I would just use a Live USB stick to access the hard drive, recover my data and install a fresh Xubuntu on my PC.

The problem was that I encrypted my home directory. To decrypt it, I needed a password (which, as I mentioned, was gone). Hopefully I recalled that during the encryption process a mount passphrase was generated, and I was informed that I should keep it in case I forget the password. So I could just use this passphrase to get my precious data and the problem was solved.

Well, not exactly. The process of decrypting my home directory was a bit more complicated than I expected and I ran into some problems. Here is how I overcame them.

Approach #1: ecryptfs-recover-private (not brilliant)

The solution recommended by most people on the Internet was to use ecryptfs-recover-private. I did that (running from a Live USB stick), and I discovered my first problem:

xubuntu@xubuntu:~$ sudo ecryptfs-recover-private
INFO: Searching for encrypted private directories (this might take a while)...
find: ‘/run/user/999/gvfs’: Permission denied
find: File system loop detected; ‘/sys/kernel/debug/pinctrl’ is part of the same file system loop as ‘/sys/kernel/debug’.

Apparently, I had to run this command from my PC’s root directory, not from my Live USB. Nothing a small chroot couldn’t fix:

xubuntu@xubuntu:~$ sudo chroot /media/xubuntu/c1ecb1af-7c15-470f-a777-48ed5eb60247/
root@xubuntu:/# ecryptfs-recover-private 
INFO: Searching for encrypted private directories (this might take a while)...
INFO: Found [/home/.ecryptfs/pawel/.Private].
Try to recover this directory? [Y/n]:
/usr/bin/ecryptfs-recover-private: 63: /usr/bin/ecryptfs-recover-private: cannot create /dev/null: Permission denied
INFO: Found your wrapped-passphrase
Do you know your LOGIN passphrase? [Y/n] n
INFO: To recover this directory, you MUST have your original MOUNT passphrase.
INFO: When you first setup your encrypted private directory, you were told to record
INFO: your MOUNT passphrase.
INFO: It should be 32 characters long, consisting of [0-9] and [a-f].

Enter your MOUNT passphrase:
INFO: Success!  Private data mounted at [/tmp/ecryptfs.z7cibvV4].

The encrypted home directory was found without a problem. Without my password, I had to use my mount passphrase, and the files were successfully decrypted!

Or so I thought. The content of the mounted directory looked like this:

Encrypted filenames

The files might have been available now, but they were rather useless without their original names. So I had to find something better.

Approach #2: mount -t ecryptfs (good enough)

Another solution was to mount the encrypted directory. To do this, I first had to add the filename encryption key (fnek) to the keyring (using the mount passphrase):

xubuntu@xubuntu:~$ sudo ecryptfs-add-passphrase --fnek
Passphrase: 
Inserted auth tok with sig [9b15cb67b475a9e1] into the user session keyring
Inserted auth tok with sig [d06fa6176f780bdb] into the user session keyring

The important key signature here is the second one (d06fa6176f780bdb).

Next I could mount my home directory:

xubuntu@xubuntu:~$ sudo mount -t ecryptfs /media/xubuntu/c1ecb1af-7c15-470f-a777-48ed5eb60247/home/.ecryptfs/pawel/.Private/ /mnt
Passphrase: 
Select cipher: 
 1) aes: blocksize = 16; min keysize = 16; max keysize = 32
 2) blowfish: blocksize = 8; min keysize = 16; max keysize = 56
 3) des3_ede: blocksize = 8; min keysize = 24; max keysize = 24
 4) twofish: blocksize = 16; min keysize = 16; max keysize = 32
 5) cast6: blocksize = 16; min keysize = 16; max keysize = 32
 6) cast5: blocksize = 8; min keysize = 5; max keysize = 16
Selection [aes]: 
Select key bytes: 
 1) 16
 2) 32
 3) 24
Selection [16]: 
Enable plaintext passthrough (y/n) [n]: 
Enable filename encryption (y/n) [n]: y
Filename Encryption Key (FNEK) Signature [9b15cb67b475a9e1]: d06fa6176f780bdb
Attempting to mount with the following options:
  ecryptfs_unlink_sigs
  ecryptfs_fnek_sig=d06fa6176f780bdb
  ecryptfs_key_bytes=16
  ecryptfs_cipher=aes
  ecryptfs_sig=9b15cb67b475a9e1
Mounted eCryptfs

In the first step I provided the mount passphrase. I kept the default values of most of the other options, except for Enable filename encryption. I then entered the key signature generated by ecryptfs-add-passphrase. My files were finally decrypted and they kept their original names! Now I could copy them and install Xubuntu on my PC.

Summary

The decryption process using the mount passphrase turned out to be possible, but not as straigtforward as I expected. I investigated one more approach, one I think would be perfect for this situation: changing the login password for the encrypted home directory. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a way to do this without knowing the old password.

I hope that this post will help you with decrypting your data. If you find a better solution or spot a mistake in this post, please let me know.