If you’ve jailbroken your iPhone or iPad then it is recommended to change the default root password to prevent someone with malicious intent from gaining access to your device.
By default, every iPhone or iPad’s root password is ‘alpine’ and if you want to keep your device more secure, it is essential that the first thing you do after jailbreaking your device is to change your root password to something unique.
If you’re a long time jailbreak user, you will remember a terminal package known as MobileTerminal which allows you to execute commands on your jailbroken iPhone or iPad. Unfortunately, the package hasn’t been updated to support iOS 8 yet.
However, there is another free alternative to MobileTerminal known as MTerminal by developer lordscotland which is a stripped-down, lightweight MobileTerminal that comes with iOS 8 support and supports gestures to make your life easier.
The gesture actions include arrow and control keys, insert/delete, Esc/Tab, fullscreen mode, paste and more.
How to change the root password:
Step 1: Install Mobile Terminal
- Launch Cydia
- Tap on the Search tab
- Search for MTerminal
- Tap on MTerminal from the search results
- Tap on Install, followed by Confirm to install MTerminal on your device.
Change root password
- Launch the MTerminal app from the Home screen.
- Type su root at the prompt and tap on the return key.
- You will be prompted to enter the password, enter alpine and tap the return key.
- Type passwd
- You will be prompted to enter the new password, enter a new password and tap the return key.
- You will be prompted to re-enter the new password, enter the new password again and tap the return key. (Note that your keypresses will not be displayed on the terminal screen for security reasons)
Change mobile user password
You should also change the password of the mobile user, which is the regular user account on your device.
- Enter passwd mobile and tap on the return key.
- You will be prompted to enter the new password. Enter alpine, and tap on the return key to continue.
- You will be prompted to re-enter the new password, enter alpine again and tap the return key.
Once done, your old root and mobile user passwords should now be changed to the new password you just set.
You can also change the password via OpenSSH, but I prefer this method as you don’t need a computer.
MTerminal is a great way of executing commands on your jailbroken iOS 8 device. If you’d like to give it a try, it is available for free on Cydia’s BigBoss repo. Let us know what you think about the package in the comments section below.
