pywallet does not output the hash in a format immediately usable by Hashcat. You often need to convert it to the $bitcoin$ format.
Without the extracted hash, you would be limited to ~0.5 guesses per second inside Bitcoin Core (due to intentional delays). With Hashcat on a decent NVIDIA RTX 4090 GPU, you achieve ~100,000 to 500,000 guesses per second . That is the difference between a 1,000-year wait and a 2-hour crack.
john --format=bitcoin-wallet --wordlist=passwords.txt wallet.hash extract hash from wallet.dat
Most extraction tools require a Python environment with specific libraries like bsddb to read the Berkeley DB format used by older wallets.
: Most recovery software requires a specific hash format to function. Method 1: Using bitcoin2john.py (The Standard Way) pywallet does not output the hash in a
Once the hash is extracted, the actual password is not revealed. Instead, the hash becomes a target for an offline dictionary or brute-force attack. For example, using hashcat: hashcat -m 11300 -a 0 extracted_hash.txt rockyou.txt
This will output the SHA-256 hash of the wallet.dat file. With Hashcat on a decent NVIDIA RTX 4090
Extraction requires parsing the Berkeley DB (BDB) format of wallet.dat and isolating the mkey record. This is a low-level process typically performed with specialized tools.
The field "hash" or sometimes "hashDecryptedKey" is what you want. If you only see "encrypted_key" and "salt" , you need to combine them with the iteration count to form a crackable hash.
The ease of hash extraction underscores a critical security principle: Once an adversary obtains the file, the only barrier is the strength of the passphrase. The extraction process itself is trivial and takes milliseconds. The real work is cracking the hash, which depends on: