Recover “lost” CRM encryption key

szczepan

Have you ever had “Data encryption can’t be activated because the encryption key doesn’t match the source encryption key used to encrypt the data” error when trying to activate/change encryption key on organization that was imported or upgraded from previous CRM version?
If you’re on on-prem and you have MSCRM_CONFIG database of source organization, you can recover your key – that told if you don’t have backed it up 🙂

First, let’s retrieve it from database:

SELECT ColumnName, VarBinaryColumn FROM OrganizationProperties
WHERE Id IN (SELECT Id FROM Organization WHERE UniqueName = '<OrgUniqName>')
AND (ColumnName = 'SymmetricKeySource')

It will look like “0xABCDEF”, looks like hexstring, let’s decode:

var sb = new StringBuilder();
var str = "0x37323A303A3130313A303A3130383A303A3130383A303A3131313A303A33323A303A38343A303A3130343A303A3130353A303A3131353A303A33323A303A37333A303A3131353A303A33323A303A3131323A303A39373A303A3131353A303A3131353A303A36343A303A3131393A303A3131313A303A3131343A303A3130303A303A34393A303A33323A303A3130323A303A3131343A303A3131313A303A3130393A303A33323A303A36373A303A38323A303A37373A30";
for (int i = 2; i < str.Length; i += 2)
{
var b1 = byte.Parse(str.Substring(i, 2), NumberStyles.HexNumber);

var part = ASCIIEncoding.ASCII.GetString(new byte[] { b1 });

sb.Append(part);
}
Console.WriteLine(sb);

Now it should look like this:

72:0:101:0:108:0:108:0:111:0:32:0:84:0:104:0:105:0:115:0:32:0:73:0:115:0:32:0:112:0:97:0:115:0:115:0:64:0:119:0:111:0:114:0:100:0:49:0:32:0:102:0:114:0:111:0:109:0:32:0:67:0:82:0:77:0

As you know, password can be Unicode, so here we go again:

var parts = sb.ToString().Split(':');
sb.Clear();
for (int i = 0; i < parts.Length; i += 2)
{
var b1 = byte.Parse(parts[i]);
var b2 = byte.Parse(parts[i + 1]);
var part = UnicodeEncoding.Unicode.GetString(new byte[] { b1, b2 });
sb.Append(part);
}
Console.WriteLine(sb);

And we have our password: Hello This Is pass@word1 from CRM.

Compare this with CRM to be sure:
CRM Encryption Key

Hope this will help someone.