I have a history of messing with reverse engineering regarding games and random things for the last 6 years. This is a little different though so I’m looking for some guidance.

I bought a heavily modified car with an aftermarket ecu that has the ability to be password locked after the tuner “tunes” the ecu (to protect their work I guess?). Anyways, I bought the car and now I need to tune it because my state has worse gas which heavily affects how the car performs, but I cannot tune it because it’s password locked. There are no laws around unlocking an ecu and as far as I’m concerned it’s my property.

The password is stored in log files and config files which I have saved off the ecu, and can be opened in a program to adjust the files. My plan of attack was to break the password check when you load the file in the tuning software, but I’ve been struggling because it’s been a long time since I’ve messed with this stuff. Any help is appreciated, thank you!

I tried finding strings regarding
The password check/input with cheat engine, using ida pro and ghidra to search for anything related in memory, and using hashcat to crack the file password (I don’t have any experience with hashcat so I’m not sure I did it right, it did not work)