Telegram Mobile App Passcode (SHA256) Hash

What is Telegram Mobile App Passcode (SHA256)?

The Telegram Mobile App Passcode mechanism employs a cryptographic workflow rooted in **SHA-256**, a widely adopted member of the SHA-2 family standardized by NIST (FIPS-180-4). Unlike raw SHA-256, Telegram’s implementation incorporates a **customized password-based key derivation function (PBKDF)** where the user’s passcode undergoes **10,000 iterations** of SHA-256 hashing with a **fixed 32-byte salt** (derived from the device’s unique hardware identifier, such as the IMEI or Android ID). This structure mitigates trivial replay attacks by binding the hash to the device, while the iterative hashing introduces computational overhead to resist brute-force attempts. The primary use-case is **secure local storage of encryption keys**—the derived hash serves as a master key for the app’s end-to-end encrypted sessions, ensuring that even if an attacker gains access to the device’s storage, they cannot decrypt messages without the passcode. The format’s design prioritizes **device-specific isolation** over traditional password hashing schemes like bcrypt or Argon2, trading some resistance to offline attacks for simplicity and compatibility with mobile constraints.

However, this scheme remains vulnerable to **offline dictionary attacks** due to its **predictable iteration count (10,000)** and **fixed-length salt**, which allows attackers to precompute hashes for common passcodes. The absence of **adaptive work factors** (unlike bcrypt’s cost parameter) means that hardware advancements—such as **GPU/FPGA acceleration**—can drastically reduce cracking time. Tools like **Hashcat** leverage optimized kernels to hash millions of passcode candidates per second, exploiting the deterministic nature of SHA-256 iterations. Additionally, the **small salt space** (32 bytes) increases collision risks if salts are reused across devices, though Telegram’s per-device binding mitigates this in practice. The lack of **memory-hard functions** (e.g., Argon2’s memory-intensive operations) further weakens resistance to **custom hardware attacks**, such as ASICs or FPGA clusters, which can parallelize hash computations at scale. Finally, the **absence of a pepper** (a secret value unique to the system) means that even if the salt is compromised, the hash remains vulnerable to offline brute-force once the device-specific salt is known.

Identifying Telegram Mobile App Passcode (SHA256) Hashes

Identifying a hash blindly is often difficult because multiple algorithms can output strings of the exact same length. For example, a standard 32-character hexadecimal string could be MD5, NTLM, MD4, or LM. To definitively identify Telegram Mobile App Passcode (SHA256), security researchers analyze the hash against a strict regular expression (regex) signature (shown above) to find structural matches.

How to Crack Telegram Mobile App Passcode (SHA256)

If you need to recover the plaintext password for a Telegram Mobile App Passcode (SHA256) hash during a penetration test or forensics investigation, you must supply the correct module ID to your cracking software. Use the exact commands provided at the top of this page to target the hash successfully.