Cisco 7 password recovery on IOS

If we encounter a situation where we need to revel Cisco 7 password but we don’t have access to the internet (sound like science fiction!) or to utility which do that we can use Cisco IOS for reveling the password.

Let’s say we logged in into R1 and as we can see there is a password on the BGP peer to R2:

R1#sh run | s bgp router bgp 65000  no synchronization  bgp log-neighbor-changes  neighbor 2.2.2.2 remote-as 65002  neighbor 2.2.2.2 password 7 106D000A061843595F  no auto-summary

In order to revel the password follow these steps:

R1#conf t Enter configuration commands, one per line.  End with CNTL/Z. R1(config)#key chain decrypt R1(config-keychain)#key 1 R1(config-keychain-key)#key-string 7 106D000A061843595F R1(config-keychain-key)#end

Note that in the key-string we start with 7 follow by the hash password we copy from the BGP peer password.

Now to see the password type:

R1#show key chain decrypt Key-chain decrypt:     key 1 -- text "Cisco123"         accept lifetime (always valid) - (always valid) [valid now]         send lifetime (always valid) - (always valid) [valid now]

The password is “Cisco123”