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I've never done a brute force before and I wanted to try it out on my phone. Considering there are 0-9 digits and 4 spaces, that gives me 10^4 combinations.

I wanted to know how I can connect my Mac to the phone through USB or something to run a brute force attack.

Note: This is for educational (curiosity) purposes only.

Edit: I see people are pointing out that the phone will lock me out after a few attempts. So let's take a hypothetical case where it doesn't do that. How can I use a USB or something to brute force some device?

P.S. - I was inspired by Gilfoyl brute forcing Jin Yang's smart fridge in Silicon Valley (TV Series)

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  • Short answer: not possible. The phone would probably stop you after few attempts.
    – Thanh Bui
    Commented Jul 9, 2017 at 4:39
  • The question should probably add an additional caveat that it doesn't lock you out after X amount of attempts. Commented Jul 9, 2017 at 5:05
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    I don't think you can do it directly with the Mac because I doubt that you can emulate an USB keyboard just by using a Mac. This is less a software thing but more a hardware thing - the USB hardware needs to support gadget mode in order to emulate a keyboard. You should be able to do it using a Rasperry Pi Zero or similar though which has such interface. Once you have the right hardware it can be very simple. Commented Jul 9, 2017 at 6:07
  • this question isn't really about 'brute forcing' - your question really is: how can I connect another computer to my phone so that I can have it input to the lock screen - in this way, this really isn't a security question
    – schroeder
    Commented Jul 9, 2017 at 7:23
  • Android actually has a maximum password length of 16
    – Joe
    Commented Jul 9, 2017 at 7:39

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As far as I know you cannot simply use your Mac as an USB keyboard. Emulating such keyboard is not a software-only problem but the hardware must be usable as USB gadget which is usually not the case with common PC hardware where all accessible USB interfaces are behind an internal USB hub.

But, USB gadget interface is supported by systems like Rasperry Zero and similar projects (Orange Pi Zero etc). Using such systems it is possible to make the hardware behave like an USB keyboard and once you have this it is more or less sending different key combinations to the device in order to unlock it. This can be done with a short script as shown here.

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