We’ve analyzed 17 popular password management apps available for Apple iOS and BlackBerry platforms, including free and commercially available tools, and discovered that no single password keeper app provides a claimed level of protection. None of the password keepers except one are utilizing iOS or BlackBerry existing security model, relying on their own implementation of data encryption. ElcomSoft research shows that those implementations fail to provide an adequate level of protection, allowing an attacker to recover encrypted information in less than a day if user-selectable Master Password is 10 to 14 digits long.

Today, we released an updated version of iOS Forensic Toolkit. It’s not as much of an update to make big news shout, but the number of improvements here and there warrants a blog post, and is definitely worth upgrading to if you’re dealing with multiple iPhones on a daily basis.

Attacking Wi-Fi passwords is near hopeless if a wireless hotspot is properly secured. Today’s wireless security algorithms such as WPA are using cryptographically sound encryption with long passwords. The standard enforces the use of passwords that are at least 8 characters long. Encryption used to protect wireless communications is tough and very slow to break. Brute-forcing WPA/WPA2 PSK passwords remains a hopeless enterprise even if a horde of GPU’s is employed. Which is, in general, good for security – but may as well inspire a false sense of security if a weak, easy to guess password is selected.

We runned yet another Password Usage Bahaviour survey on our Web site and gthered statistically significant data, reflected in the following charts. And the main conclusion was that most people working with sensitive information want stricter security policies but rarely bother changing default passwords.

iOS 5 Support

Less than a month ago, we updated our Elcomsoft Phone Password Breaker tool with the ability to recover master passwords for BlackBerry Password Keeper and BlackBerry Wallet. I have blogged about that and promised the “next big thing” for BlackBerry forensics to be coming soon. The day arrived.

Conferences are good. When attending Mobile Forensics Conference this year (and demoing our iOS Forensic Toolkit), we received a lot of requests for tools aimed at BlackBerry forensics. Sorry guys, we can’t offer the solution for physical acquisition of BlackBerries (yet), but there is something new we can offer right now.

Yet again, we are back from a couple of conferences organized specially for heavy computer users like us. We are particularly happy that our company was again warmly welcomed by the overseas hacking community – thank you for accepting and visiting our talk – and that FBI didn’t bother us too much during our stay, though they didn’t miss a chance to scare the crap out of Andrey and Vladimir right before their departure back to Moscow.  Apart from that little episode with three-letter guys everything went smoothly.