1 Passwords

TrueCrypt only uses encryption algorithms which are founded to be secure. Therefore, the only way to crack a TrueCrypt Volume is to Brute force the password.

1.1 Why I need a Wordlist?
As it makes no sense to brute force the full range of the ASCII Table, this type is not supported. You have to create your own Wordlist. The benefit of that is, that you are able to use any tool you want to create your wordlist.

1.2 How to create a Wordlist?
You need a good Wordlist generator. In fact, mostly you need a very personalized generator program to create your list. You can use Brutus for example, but very often it’s not dynamic enough.
You may know some parts of your Password, and you may only have forgotten the order of some signs…
The Securityvision Team is working on a dynamic Wordlist generator, but for now, you have to contact someone which is able to create a wordlist generator. You may also contact us in this case.

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2 Keyfiles

2.1 I lost my Keyfile?
Recovering a keyfile using brute force is in the majority of cases impossible due the size of those files. Moreover, the keyfiles are merged into the password byte buffer which is much smaller than the keyfile size (1 MB). The Password Buffer size (allso called password pool) is 64 byte (512 bit). Read capter 3 Raw bruteforce attack.


2.2 I forgot the order of my Keyfiles!
RTFM! The order of the Keyfiles doesn’t matter, they are merged in a way which doesn't care which one was applied first.


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3 Raw bruteforce attack (against 64 byte password buffer)

If a keyfile is lost, you can forget everything about wordlists and all other possible keyfiles. Truecrypt works with a password buffer of 64 bytes. Into this buffer are all keyfiles and the password applied. So what you can do is bruteforce the raw password byte buffer of its 64 byte lenght. This works indepently of any password or keyfile count - in the end,  the 64 byte password buffer is generated and only this matters.

It is currently not possible to bruteforce such a big range in acceptable time, so the short answer is: Game over!

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4 Attacks against foreign TrueCrypt volumes

If the whole password is unknown, cracking a truecrypt volume is mostly impossible. There're other, really different attacks which are more effective;

4.1 Remote
An injected Trojan, which steals tc password while mounting, or copy the data if the volume is mounted is much more dangerous.

4.1 With physical access
Well, physical access offers some special opportunities.

If the system is not fully encrypted, its easy to get access to the filesystem, therefore it's easy to install a Trojan. If the target machine is secured with preboot authentication it's a bit harder - but still possible. There is one part, which is never encrypted -> the bootloader.

So, the goal is to infect/manipulate the truecrypt bootloader and let him save the user password - so we can read it out later.

This concept was successful implemented by Joanna Rutkowska. Truecrypt therefore has no validation of the bootloader, - this would fix this security issue.