Let's say that a user has lost or forgotten their password. Is there a way to reset the password or recover it?
[Ethereum] How to recover or reset a lost wallet password
passwordrecoverywallets
Related Solutions
1) Is there any way to recover account if keystore file is lost?
No. The private key effectively is the account, for all practical purposes.
2) Is there any way to recover account in case of forgot passphrase?
If you remember at least part of your password, then there are tools to attempt recovery, covered in this previous thread:
Don't worry, all is not lost!
When you create an account in Parity, or an Ethereum client, the private key and account details are stored encrypted in a keystore file on your hard drive. You enter the password to enable the decryption of the private key for the account in order to sign a transaction.
The 12 word mnemonic phrase is just a clever way to encode your private key in a more human-friendly way: it is in effect your private key and all you need to recover your account using Parity, MetaMask etc.
As per the Parity documentation:
In addition, it's possible to restore private keys from the 12-word mnemonic recovery phrase.
In Parity, you can click on the "Restore" option seen in the screenshot below:
Which will give you a screen where you can enter the 12 words and enter a new password (to encrypt the subsequently generated keystore file):
Best Answer
There is no way for the Ethereum Foundation to reset your password, but some enterprising community members have developed tools to assist with the password recovery process.
If you are familiar with Python (or willing to learn some basics), the best tool so far is a particular version of pyethrecover. Let us suppose that you know part of your password, but can't remember all of it (or perhaps you put in a typo during the presale or when you created the wallet). You can easily input the parts of the password you remember, and then add possible characters to check for those parts of the password you've forgotten. The program will then check all permutations of that possible password space to see if any combination unlocks your wallet. This is a lot easier than manually typing every possibility.
I've also saved a screen shot of the original presale page in case that helps jog your memory.