Test the strength of your password with USBCrypt


When using USBCrypt to password protect drives, you have probably wondered, how difficult would it be for someone to just try all possible character combinations and discover the correct password that way? If someone were to write a program to automate the process of simulating the password entry, how fast would it take to discover the correct password?

Well, you may be surprised to learn that there is no need to write a special program for that, because USBCrypt already includes such a command out of the box! It's easy to try it: just try starting an encrypted drive, as usual, but instead of entering the password, click on the Tools button and select the Recover Password item on the menu:

USBCrypt comes with a command to recover the password by using the brute force

On the next screen, select the character set you want to try. You can select the minimum and maximum length of the passwords to try, and also choose between the lower-case or upper-case characters, digits, special characters, or any combination of them:

The settings for the Recover Password command of USBCrypt

When you press the Start button, USBCrypt starts to try the passwords from the character set you've selected, in turn, until it finds one that unlocks the encrypted drive. It displays the progress in a separate window, that also shows the estimated time to complete the enumeration of all possible passwords:

The progress of the Recover Password command of USBCrypt

If you've selected a very simple password, it can be discovered rather quickly, and the result is displayed right away:

The successful result of the Recover Password command of USBCrypt

What about the more complex passwords? The time to try them all grows rapidly as the length of the password or its complexity increases. Here are a few numbers, obtained on a computer with a mid-range (as of the time of this writing) Intel i5-650 CPU:

Characters/Maximum length:Up to 3Up to 5Up to 7
Lowercase30 minutes15 days28 years
Lowercase + Uppercase4 hours1 year35 hundred years
Lowercase + Uppercase + digits7 hours3 years12 thousand years
Lowercase + Uppercase + digits + all special characters1 day 26 years240 thousand years


(You may get different numbers, depending on the CPU your computer has.)

As you can see, by choosing a password that's complex enough, you can protect your secrets with USBCrypt pretty well. On the flip side, take care to remember your password, because if you forget it, it would be practically impossible to recover it (unless you have created a spare key file with USBCrypt, of course.

Happy encrypting!

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