README

Android PIN Bruteforce
Unlock an Android phone or device
by brute-forcing the lock screen PIN.
Turn any Kali Nethunter phone into
bruteforce PIN cracker of Android!

To learn about the commands and other usage details

It uses a USB OTG cable to connect the locked phone to the Nethunter device.
It emulates a keyboard, automatically tries PINs, and waits after trying too many wrong guesses.

[Nethunter phone] ⇌ [USB cable] ⇌ [USB OTG adaptor] ⇌ [Locked Android phone]

The USB HID Gadget driver provides emulation of USB Human Interface Devices (HID).
This enables an Android Nethunter device to emulate keyboard input to the locked phone.
It's just like plugging a keyboard into a locked phone and pressing keys.

⏳ This takes a bit over 16.6 hours to try all possible 4-digit PINs,
but with the optimised PIN list it should take you much less time.

✅ You will need
- A locked Android phone
- A Nethunter phone (or any rooted Android with HID kernel support)
- USB OTG (On The Go) cable/adapter (USB male Micro-B to female USB A) and a standard charging cable (USB male Micro-B to male A).

✨ Benefits
Turn your NetHunter phone into an Android PIN-cracking machine
Unlike other methods, you do not need ADB or USB debugging enabled on the locked phone
You don't need to buy special hardware, e.g. Rubber Ducky, Teensy, Cellebrite, XPIN Clip, etc.
You can easily modify the backoff time to crack other types of devices
It works!

👉🏻 Features
- Optimized PIN list
- Bypasses phone pop-ups including the Low Power Warning
- Detects when the phone is unplugged or powered off, and waits while retrying every 5 seconds
- Configurable delays of N seconds after every X PIN attempt
- A log file gets created for further debugging

⚙ Installation & Usage
Android-PIN-Bruteforce is used to unlock an Android phone (or device) by brute forcing the lock screen PIN.

  Find more information at: https://github.com/utsanjan/Android-Pin-Bruteforce

Commands:
  crack             Begin cracking PINs
  resume            Resume from a chosen PIN
  rewind            Crack PINs in reverse from a chosen PIN
  diag              Display diagnostic information

Options:
  -f, --from PIN    Resume from this PIN
  -m, --mask REGEX  Use a mask for known digits in the PIN
  -t, --type TYPE   Select PIN or PATTERN cracking
  -l, --length NUM  Crack PINs of NUM length
  -d, --dry-run     Dry run for testing. Doesn't send any keys.
  -v, --verbose     Output verbose logs.

Usage:
  android-pin-bruteforce <command> [options]
📌 PIN Lists
Optimized PIN list
pinlist.txt is an optimized list of all possible 4-digit PINs,
sorted by order of likelihood. pinlist.txt is from the following:
https://github.com/mandatoryprogrammer/droidbrute

This list is used with permission from Justin Engler & Paul Vines from Senior Security Engineer, iSEC Partners, and was used in their Defcon talk, Electromechanical PIN Cracking with Robotic Reconfigurable Button Basher (and C3BO)

🎭 Cracking with Masks
Masks use regular expressions with the standard grep extended format.

./android-pin-bruteforce crack --mask "...[45]" --dry-run

To try all years from 1900 to 1999, use a mask of 19..
To try PINs that have a 1 in the first digit, and a 1 in the last digit, use a mask of 1..1
To try PINs that end in 4 or 5, use ...[45]
🙁 Troubleshooting
Executing the script
If you installed the script to /sdcard/, you can
execute it with the following command.

bash ./android-pin-bruteforce

Note that Android mounts /sdcard with the noexec flag. You can verify this with mount.

Check the cables
The OTG cable should be connected to the locked Android phone.
The regular USB cable should be connected to the Nethunter phone.

Diagnostics
Use the diagnostic command.

bash ./android-pin-bruteforce diag

Note that Nethunter USB HID support was inconsistent during testing and development.
However, after it starts working, it should continue working until you crack the PIN.

If you receive this message when the USB cable is plugged in then try taking
the battery out of the locked Android phone and power cycling it.

[FAIL] HID USB device not ready. The return code from /system/xbin/hid-keyboard was 5.

Known Issues
This cannot detect when it unlocks
Tips & Tricks
Try powering off the phone and taking out the battery
Try sending keys to your PC or laptop
Note that the Device Not Found messages
are not as important as sending keys successfully.

🧑🏻‍💻 Technical Details
This works from an Android phone because the USB ports
are not bidirectional, unlike the ports on a laptop.

Keys are sent using /system/xbin/hid-keyboard.
To test this and send the key 1 you can use the following:
echo 1 | /system/xbin/hid-keyboard dev/hidg0 keyboard

Before each PIN, we send the escape and enter keys. This is to keep the Android responsive and dismiss any popups about the number of incorrect PIN attempts or a low battery warning. My original motivation to develop this was to unlock a Samsung S5 Android phone. It had belonged to someone who had passed away, and their family needed access to the data on it. As I didn't have a USB Rubber Ducky or any other hardware handy, I tried using a variety of methods and eventually realized I had to develop something new.