We were attending the DFRWS EU forum in beautiful Florence, and held a workshop on iOS forensics. During the workshop, an attendee tweeted a photo of the first slide of our workshop, and the first response was from… one of our competitors. He said “Looking forward to the “Accessing a locked device” slide”. You can follow our conversation on Twitter, it is worth reading.

iOS is a locked down mobile operating system that does not allow its apps to directly access files in the file system. Unlike every other major mobile OS, iOS does not have a “shared” area in the file system to allow apps keep and share files with other apps. Yet, individual iOS apps are allowed to let the user access their files by using the file sharing mechanism.

It’s been a long while since we made an update to one of our most technically advanced tools, Elcomsoft Forensic Disk Decryptor (EFDD). With this tool, one could extract data from an encrypted disk volume (FileVault 2, PGP, BitLocker or TrueCrypt) by utilizing the binary encryption key contained in the computer’s RAM. We could find and extract that key by analyzing the memory dump or hibernation files.

Forget battery issues. Yes, Apple issued an apology for slowing down the iPhone and promised to add better battery management in future versions of iOS, but that’s not the point in iOS 11.3. Neither are ARKit improvements or AirPlay 2 support. There is something much more important, and it is gong to affect everyone.

What are iCloud authentication tokens? How they are better than good old passwords? Do they ever expire and when? Where to get them? Is there anything else I should know about tokens? This publication opens a new series on token-based authentication.

Who am I to tell you to use two-factor authentication on all accounts that support it? This recommendation coming from someone whose business is supplying law enforcement with tools helping them do their job might be taken with a grain of salt by an average consumer. Yet we still strongly believe that, however good a password you have to encrypt your local documents or NAS drives, any remotely popular online service absolutely requires an additional authentication factor.

Tired of reading on lockdown/pairing records? Sorry, we can’t stop. Pairing records are the key to access the content of a locked iPhone. We have recently made a number of findings allowing us to extract even more information from locked devices through the use of lockdown records. It’s not a breakthrough discovery and will never make front page news, but having more possibilities is always great.

iOS 11 has arrived, now running on every second Apple device. There could not be a better time to reminiscent how iOS forensics has started just a few short years ago. Let’s have a look at what was possible back then, what is possible now, and what can be expected of iOS forensics in the future.

“Can you unlock that iPhone?” is one of the most common questions we hear on various events and from our customers. There is no simple answer, but more often than not some options are available.