So, I’m dealing with a Multibit HD wallet that’s got over .5 BTC in it, and I really need to recover it for someone. It’s a tough spot because the person was diligent about saving their seed words until now. Recently, though, they hit this snag where they know the password but it just won't unlock the wallet.
I’ve tried a bunch of stuff: mbexport, a forked version, and even decrypt_bitcoinj_seed-master. I’ve been running through various password combinations, hoping that maybe a character was off somewhere (I’ve read about that bug related to UTF 16 translation?).
What’s caught my attention is that the old YAML files from the earlier Multibit HD wallets (version 0.4.1) only contained basic preferences like balance settings. But with the 0.5.1 version, the YAML files show two interesting values:
encryptedPassword: 88 characters ending with +, / and ==
encryptedBackupKey: 64 characters featuring / and + but no = sign.
So, my main question here is how these two values can be useful for recovery since I also have the rolling and zip backup files.
Test password variations; as you mentioned a possible issue with UTF-16, try removing or adding trailing spaces, test versions with and without uppercase letters, and if your password contains special characters, convert them to their ASCII forms
Perform brute force; extract the base64 data from the "encryptedPassword" and use a script to test various password combinations. If you're able to decrypt this block, then that's the correct password
You can also perform brute force directly on the ".wallet" file. Since you have "continuous backups" and ZIP backups, you have multiple snapshots to test sometimes, an older file may not have the same corruption as a later version
That's all I know so far; I hope I can help you
Does anyone at all know what these 2 values in the YAML file could be used for?
I guess I am going to do a deep dive into the Multibit HD code itself to find out how it gets utilized, but if in the meantime anybody actually knows something about this.
I hope I can figure this out because my cut is about $20K worth of the BTC.
I found this answer from one of the developers of Multibit, hope it helps:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1198563.msg12590985#msg12590985
Btw, I recovered the wallet of the OP.
Cheers.
Did you express yourself incorrectly or did I misunderstand something? First you post a link for help, then you say you recovered OP's wallet - and besides, OP hasn't been online since the beginning of January.