Hacker News Reader

While reading I had the feeling that the author was reverse-engineering open source software...

In essence, that's precisely what he's doing. The exact on-disk metadata layout may not be documented anywhere, so he pieced it together using the structure definitions in the source code.

For those reading along at home, what is being done here is a run-of-the-mill bruteforce, this article could be about any FDE implementation.

So now the real question .. what was the password? :-)

hunter2

All I see is * * * * * *

I've had to do a similar thing with OpenBSD's softraid. In an unfortunate incident with a problematic hard drive that mostly works but sometimes gets stuck reading / clicking for a while. That while once took too long and resulted in a timeout, softraid flagged the disk as being offline. I started a rebuild, but later on got a bit paranoid and ran smart checks on both of the mirrored disks. Well, the other disk didn't respond well to smart and got itself flagged offline. Now my softraid mirror was down with one disk halfway through a rebuild and the other disk just fine but flagged bad.
Recovery was a matter of finding the right metadata bit on the disk that tells softraid about the disk's status. That was the hardest part (and not that hard, but it certainly felt like reverse-engineering the system). I flipped a byte with dd and my brought the raid up again.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com