If you worked through the last tutorial, you will most likely be somewhat confident with using SSH to access your iDevice’s file system.

You may recall the mention of a password called ‘alpine’. This is the default root password that is assigned to any and all iDevices upon installing the OpenSSH package from Cydia.  Obviously, keeping your root password as alpine, could potentially lead to security risks, albeit that chance of being affected by such risks is extremely low. Still, it would be wise to change your root password, if only for peace of mind.

Okay, so the steps are rather simple. Let’s get right into it.

Step One:

First of all, you will need to download the ‘Mobile Terminal’ package from Cydia. Once installed, open it.

Step Two:

Next, you will be presented with a rather simple CLI (command line interface) which you can use to input commands. This is a powerful tool, however, it is more than likely that you will only ever use it to change your root password.
Now that you are in the terminal app, enter the su root command.

Step Three:

You will be prompted to enter a password. Of course, the password is alpine, so enter alpine into the CLI.

Step Four:

If you entered the password correctly, you will now be logged into your device’s file system with root-level access. What you will need to do at this point is alter your existing password. As you might expect, you must enter the passwd command to accomplish this.

Step Five:

At this point, you will be prompted to enter a password. Instead of entering ‘alpine’ as the password, enter what you want your new password to be. After you have done this, you will be prompted to re-enter your new password. Enter it once more and you are done.

Step Six:

Finally, safely exit the CLI by entering the exit command. The app will most likely output a message along the lines of “type anything to restart”. As there is no need to restart, simply press the home button once to exit the application.