accounts.db encoding

[Guest 00Mark]

Hi,

I'm trying to retrieve a Google account password stored on my phone. I don't want to change it, or go through the lengthy password recovery system (it's a very old account, I can't remember the security questions and the recovery email is long gone).

I read an article about how Google passwords were stored in plain text, in the accounts.db database. Some people said this is still the case as of JB (I'm on ICS).

To test this, I opened the database on my computer but the passwords are not in plain text. Instead, each is a 70-character long string, making it look like some sort of hash -- but I thought that storing passwords as hashes would not work because they cannot be decrypted, so perhaps it's an encoding.

Does anyone know what sort of encoding is used for these? And is it possible to decrypt back to plain text?

Thanks