I've lost my .encfs6.xml
file for a encfs volume. I still know my passphrase. Is there anyway to regenerate the .encfs6.xml
based on similar volumes and the passphrase? Any chance of brute-forcing?
2 Answers
The passphrase is completely irrelevant if you've lost the master key. Imagine you had a treasure trove locked in a huge safe and you've locked the key to that safe in a locker. The treasure trove is your encfs volume, the key to the locker is your passphrase. The locker is gone now. The key to the locker that has the safe key is of no use when you're trying to get into the safe and don't have the locker with the safe key in it.
In my case, I had lost the .encfs6.xml
due to file system corruption on a failing drive (the drive still worked but there were read/write errors, fsck just made things worse). I ended up using foremost to search for all xml files. It found two copies of the .encfs6.xml
.