Phantom Wallet Password Recovery

Phantom operates very similarly to MetaMask but on the Solana side: it stores your encrypted seed (or imported private keys) in browser extension IndexedDB. If you forgot the password but the browser profile is intact, recovery is feasible. If the browser was reset or the extension uninstalled, only the 12 or 24-word seed phrase can restore your wallet.

How Phantom encrypts your seed

Phantom uses standard Web Crypto APIs. The encryption envelope is similar to MetaMask but with significantly higher PBKDF2 iteration count (~100,000 instead of 10,000), making brute force somewhat slower but still tractable.

// Simplified Phantom encryption
async function encrypt(password, plaintext) {
  const salt = crypto.getRandomValues(new Uint8Array(16));
  const key = await crypto.subtle.deriveKey(
    { name: "PBKDF2", salt, iterations: 100000, hash: "SHA-256" },
    passwordKey,
    { name: "AES-GCM", length: 256 },
    false,
    ["encrypt"]
  );
  const iv = crypto.getRandomValues(new Uint8Array(12));
  const ciphertext = await crypto.subtle.encrypt(
    { name: "AES-GCM", iv }, key,
    new TextEncoder().encode(JSON.stringify(plaintext))
  );
  return { salt, iv, ciphertext };
}

Vault locations on disk

Always copy the entire LevelDB folder (*.log, *.ldb, MANIFEST-*, CURRENT). Do not open it while Chrome is running.

Extracting the vault interactively

1. Open chrome://extensions/
2. Toggle Developer mode (top right)
3. Find Phantom, click "Inspect views: service worker"
4. In DevTools, go to Application → IndexedDB → phantom_storage → keys
5. Look for the entry holding encryptedKey — a JSON string with salt, iv, ciphertext
6. Copy and save to phantom_vault.json

Brute-forcing with custom Python + GPU

# Verification function (CPU, slow but exact)
from hashlib import pbkdf2_hmac
from Crypto.Cipher import AES
import base64, json

vault = json.load(open('phantom_vault.json'))
salt = base64.b64decode(vault['salt'])
iv   = base64.b64decode(vault['iv'])
ct   = base64.b64decode(vault['ciphertext'])

def try_password(pw):
    key = pbkdf2_hmac('sha256', pw.encode(), salt, 100000, 32)
    cipher = AES.new(key, AES.MODE_GCM, nonce=iv)
    try:
        plain = cipher.decrypt_and_verify(ct[:-16], ct[-16:])
        return plain.decode()  # contains seed words
    except Exception:
        return None

for pw in open('candidates.txt'):
    result = try_password(pw.strip())
    if result:
        print("FOUND:", pw)
        print(result)
        break

# For GPU acceleration, btcrecover-experimental supports Phantom natively

GPU throughput estimates

Recoverable vs not

Related guides

• Solana wallets overview — Phantom and Solflare side-by-side.
• MetaMask vault recovery — sister guide on the EVM side.
• BIP39 seed recovery.
• Recovery scam taxonomy.

Frequently asked questions