I'm trying to recover a lost master password for VMware Virtual Center Single Sign-On service. The encoded hash has been recovered from the database and looks like this:

{SSHA256}KGOnPYya2qwhF9w4xK157EZZ/RqIxParohltZWU7h2T/VGjNRA==

Note that this is not the actual string, this is for a known password which can be found in several places on the net: "VMware1234!".

(I have already tried the unsupported pass-the-hash method for password recovery as described in several places and it didn't work. I don't know why.)

Since this string doesn't actually look like a SSHA256 hash, I'm wondering of anyone has a clue how to decode this string into an actual SSHA256 hash that I might run through a hash lookup service?

Applying MIME::Base64 was my first thought, this produces a binary string which is unfortunately a little too long to be the SSHA256 hash. Encryption really isn't my strong suit so I'm at a loss here... Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Alternatively, if I knew how to decode/encode this string to a real SHA256 hash I might even try to put together a script to bruteforce it, because I have lots of time and CPU resources to throw at this problem and I'm pretty sure I know part of the password I'm looking for. In short, how do I produce the hash string shown above from the password "VMware1234!"?

I hope you'll trust me when I say that this is completely white-hat; our VMware vCenter was installed two years ago by a consultant who forgot to write down the SSO Master password at the time and this is preventing us from updating that installation to a current version without a full reinstall.

Cracking it would be much cheaper. And so much more fun.

-- FloydATC

Time flies when you don't know what you're doing

In reply to How to encode/decode an SSHA256 hash? by FloydATC

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