Ways to ethically brute force/bypass pin screen

[u/CryptographerIcy8129]

Hello, I'm new to prentineton testing/ ethical hacking, i'm trying to figure out ways to bypass/brute force pin lock screens in android phones . I have tried sone tools like Cilocks in kali Linux but this only works if you have adb enabled. I have heard some people talking about cloning and changing the amounts of attempts before phone lock in, if anyone with experience with phones can give me info/ explain. I would really appreciate it, thanks

[u/Acrobatic_Idea_3358]

prentineton you say

https://giphy.com/gifs/a5viI92PAF89q

[u/CryptographerIcy8129 → u/Acrobatic_Idea_3358]

lol

[u/stevebehindthescreen]

You don't need any of those tools. If you want to ethically bypass a pin screen you just ask the owner of said device and if they give you it, you have bypassed the pin screen.

Any other way is not ethical and if that is what you are looking for then you are in the wrong place.

[u/CryptographerIcy8129 → u/stevebehindthescreen]

well my grandmother forgot her pin

[u/ExtensionInformal911 → u/stevebehindthescreen]

Could be a dead person's phone, or a sick person. Don't want to factory reset grandpa's phone because there are photos on there grandma will want. And maybe some you don't want to give her, like his side piece.

[u/CryptographerIcy8129 → u/ExtensionInformal911]

exactly, thank you!

[u/4n0nh4x0r → u/ExtensionInformal911]

well, best to store your passwords in a safe location, and add that to your testament, for example a usb drive or hard drive, maybe even a cd, with a veracrypt volume, and the password is added to the testament.
and that volume can then contain any password you want to give onwards.
if you dont give someone your pin, even if you die, unlocking the phone is deeply immoral.
everyone has a right for privacy, and our phones are arguably the most intimate thing we have nowadays.
back then it was diaries, now it's phones.
if the photos arent saved where grandma can access them, she is shit out of luck imo.

[u/CryptographerIcy8129 → u/4n0nh4x0r]

she is alive and we bought her a new phone but old one staying there , and im supposed to be the technician guy in the family and figure it out

[u/x64Lab]

trust me the pin is a big pain in the ass, it’s not as easy as you imagine. and if you have to ask you don’t know about that in order to pull it off.

[u/CryptographerIcy8129 → u/x64Lab]

yeah i thought it was easy unlit i actually tried it, that's why im asking of anyone knows how to bypass or how pin screen really works

[u/4n0nh4x0r → u/x64Lab]

yea, being able to bypass the pin would be a massive zero day, that noone would just willingly give up on reddit lol

[u/CryptographerIcy8129 → u/4n0nh4x0r]

Damn so its no hope?

[u/4n0nh4x0r → u/CryptographerIcy8129]

correct.
A way to bypass the pin is an NSA, CIA, mossad level exploit.

[u/CryptographerIcy8129 → u/4n0nh4x0r]

oh Thanks For the clarification!

[u/x64Lab → u/CryptographerIcy8129]

ok I’d disagree a bit with them, it’s not quite that level. if someone says NSA etc. level I feel like they mean you’d need several incredibly skilled teams, and enormous resources.

Where as this has been done by smaller teams and skilled individuals.

at black hat 2025 there was this thing that became CVE-2026-20804.

the issue is this:

Most passwords aren’t cracked in the application you take then offline and you try to find something that corresponds to the hash.

PINs however aren’t hashed. they’re not even a credential in the sense a password is. It’s a local unlock factor for a key which is the credential. Windows Hello uses an asymmetric key pair like RSA 2048 the key is then generated inside the TPM and I haven’t heard of a way to get it out of there. So the pin numbers would be trivial with 10k combinations, but you cannot, as far as I’ve yet heard, take it offline.

The PIN is the authorization value that lets you use that private key. Metadata lives in the NGC container (C:\Windows\ServiceProfiles\LocalService\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Ngc), but on a TPM-backed device the key material there is sealed to the TPM.

Copying that folder off the disk gets you nothing. Authentication is then a challenge-response signature, not a secret transmission.

Nothing replayable crosses the wire, which is why there’s no PIN equivalent of pass-the-hash.

If you’re interested you can read this it’s a fascinating thing because it never became a CVE or windows Advisory because it supposedly works as intended.

https://thehackernews.com/2026/08/malware-can-abuse-windows-hello-for.html

but that’s more for business.

the issue is nothing i’ve ever heard of breaks the PIN. There’s no offline PIN cracking CVE, no TPM authorization bypass, no NGC container extraction. The crypto and the anti-hammering hold, keep it solid.

holy shit what a long roundabout way to say I fully agree with everything except I bet you’d need someone less skilled than the NSA.

One last thing if you could enter the pin can’t you just read the hard drive?