Linksys admin password change with special character

0

I just changed my Linksys router (WRT110, latest firmware 1.0.07) password to one containing one special accented character (é in this occurence), among the 22 characters (all others lowercase alphabetical). I'm certain that the password is right, because I typed it in cleartext before and then pasted it into the fields.

The password change succeeded, but now I can't login anymore, and I want to avoid doing a reset.

I couldn't find any resource regarding special characters in Linksys admin passwords, or perhaps a length limit that I didn't notice. Could someone point me in the right direction / offer reasons as to why I can't login?

Lazlo

Posted 2013-12-30T00:47:36.393

Reputation: 205

Answers

1

There are two possibilities I can think of:

  1. The system sanitizes the strings to weed out special characters and this got either removed or converted to a normal letter (probably e). Try logging in with both options.

  2. The character got scrambled ('mojibake') by the firmware. In this case, you would have to deliberately "corrupt" that character in the same way to find out what it was converted into.

K.A.Monica

Posted 2013-12-30T00:47:36.393

Reputation: 5 887

I tried the password without the é, with an e instead, with é, %E9 and %e9. How else could it be scrambled? – Lazlo – 2013-12-30T03:56:00.423

1If you switch code pages it can be transformed into totally different symbols. I'm trying to find a utility to do so, but it appears to require programming. You might ask on the programmers' site if they know of a place/list of equivalents for é in different code pages. – K.A.Monica – 2013-12-30T04:36:06.477

@Lazlo - You might have to accept the only solution is to reset the device. I encourage you to learn from this mistake and backup the settings of your router. This way a reset isn't a problem. – Ramhound – 2013-12-30T12:24:05.270

2An é can be typed as a single character (LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH ACUTE, Unicode: U+00E9) but also as (LATIN SMALL LETTER E, U+0065 + COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT, Unicode: U+0301). Some systems sanitise one form into the other. The end result is visually the same: é vs é. – RikkusRukkus – 2013-12-31T12:28:32.723

Asked: 2013-12-30T00:47:36.393

Viewed: 498 times

Active: 2019-02-09T11:08:47.220