aMSN Password Recovery

I often forgot the passwords for my msn accounts, as I only use them for chatting over the MSN protocol, using an external e-mail address, with another password that my main mailbox have (for security reasons). So, as aMSN has the "remember password" feature, I use it, and it does perfectly its job as I forget it because I'm never typing my password.

I looked a lot over the internet to find a nice way to recover them, but the given response is "you shall not forget your passwords". So I decided to look at the aMsn TCL scripts (yes, aMSN is mostly written in TCL) to take a look onto how the passwords were enciphered and deciphered.

I did it on Gentoo/Linux, and the hack is really easy, you just need a root account, or either an access to the sudo command.

First step, locate the amsn config.tcl script, I have it in /usr/share/amsn/, then look for the word 'encpassword' (line 686 on my file), then you should find a few lines below :

Line 693:
#puts "Password is: $password\nHi\n"
and, or Line 704:
#puts "Password is: [::config::getKey remotepassword]\nHi\n"

(Actually, only the first one should be necessary.)

Then, just edit that file, by only removing these # at the beginning of the lines, save it, open a console, then run amsn from the console.

You will see a magical output giving your password. If you use several accounts, just choose the right account in the combobox, the password will appear on the console.

Now, don't forget to undo the changes you made to config.tcl !



NB aux lecteurs français : J'ai écrit ce billet en anglais, je prépare une traduction en français