How to recover Google Chrome passwords and cookies

If you’re one of the two people in the world that follow my blog (thank you Mom!) then you know that I’ve recently had a run-in with physics and my hard drive lost. Long story short, I was able to recover the files like so.

If you’ve reinstalled your machine like me, then recovering your stored Chrome passwords might not be super straightforward. Fear not, Nir Sofer wrote ChromePass which lets you gather your old Chrome passwords given your previous NTUSER.DAT and your previous user Windows Password. Neato. Yeah well it didn’t really work for me since for some reason my password wasn’t saved in my “Saved Passwords” thingy.

So I figured I’d look into my cookies. It turns out Chrome uses SQLite to store a bunch of its data including Cookies. I found this blog which contains a link to SQLite Browser. To run it you’ll need to have the Microsoft Visual C Runtime 7.1. It’s not going to be straightforward to get it installed right, so that’s the topic of my previous blog post (here).

From here and with some SQL syntax refreshing, I was able to see the entries stored in my cookies and apparently my utilities company stores my authentication information in cookies. Now I don’t have to reset my password!

Comments

• Anonymous
  March 24, 2014
  Great post! I can view the saved login information using SQLite Browser but the passwords are still displayed in an encrypted format. Eventually I recover the saved passwords using this trick: www.top-password.com/.../google-chrome-password-recovery