Password managers or password reuse? This is the question faced by most consumers. Reusing a password or its minor variations for different accounts has never been a good idea, yet in today’s world of online everything the rate of password reuse reaches astonishing values. Using a password manager helps reduce password reuse, supposedly offering increased security. In this article, we’ll perform forensic analysis of some of the most common password managers.

ASUSTOR advertises secure AES encryption with a 256-bit key. According to the manufacturer, AES-256 encryption is made available through the entire range of its current NAS devices. Unlike other manufacturers, ASUSTOR is very upfront regarding the type of encryption employed by its NAS devices: “ASUSTOR NAS offers folder based military grade AES 256-bit encryption”. As a result, we’re once again dealing with folder-based encryption running on top of the open-source encrypting file system eCryptfs. We’ve already seen eCryptfs-based encryption in attached storage devices made by Synology and TerraMaster. Does ASUSTOR have any surprises, or will its implementation of folder-based encryption suffer from the many restrictions and limitations? Let’s find out.

Modern wireless networks are securely protected with WPA/WPA2. The most frequently used method of securing access to a wireless network is pre-shared passphrase, or, simply put, a text password. The WPA standard enforces the minimum length of 8 characters for all Wi-Fi passwords. Considering the relatively low performance of WPA/WPA2 password attacks, brute force attacks are rarely effective even when performed with a network of GPU-accelerated computers. In this article, I will show how to attack wireless passwords for the purpose of security audit.

How can you make your system and documents secure? Today, 256-bit AES encryption is offered by everyone and their dog. However, AES encryption does not mean much (or anything at all) when it comes to the real security of your data. Implementing encryption at the right time and in the right spot is no less important than choosing strong encryption credentials and managing the encryption keys.

Thecus has been manufacturing NAS devices for more than 15 years. The company develops an in-house Linux-based NAS OS, the ThecusOS. At this time, the most current version of the OS is ThecusOS 7. Thecus advertises secure data encryption in most of its NAS devices. The company’s volume-based encryption tool allows users to fully encrypt their entire RAID volume, defending essential data in instances of theft of the physical device. We found Thecus’ implementation of encryption somewhat unique. In this research, we’ll verify the manufacturer’s claims and check just how secure is Thecus’ implementation of 256-bit AES encryption.

For us, this year has been extremely replete with all sorts of developments in desktop, mobile and cloud forensics. We are proud with our achievements and want to share with you. Let’s have a quick look at what we’ve achieved in the year 2019.

The past two years introduced a number of challenges forensic experts have never faced before. In 2018, Apple made it more difficult for the police to safely transport a seized iPhone to the lab by locking the USB port with USB restricted mode, making data preservation a challenge. The release of the A12 platform, also in 2018, made it difficult to unlock iOS devices protected with an unknown password, while this year’s release of iOS 13 rendered unlock boxes useless on iPhones based on the two most recent platforms.

Home users and small offices are served by two major manufacturers of network attached storage devices (NAS): QNAP and Synology, with Western Digital being a distant third. All Qnap and Synology network attached storage models are advertised with support for hardware-accelerated AES encryption. Encrypted NAS devices can be a real roadblock on the way of forensic investigations. In this article, we’ll review the common encryption scenarios used in home and small office models of network attached storage devices made by Synology. (more…)

What can and what cannot be done with an iOS device using Touch ID/Face ID authentication as opposed to knowing the passcode? The differences are huge. For the sake of simplicity, we’ll only cover iOS 12 and 13. If you just want a quick summary, scroll down to the end of the article for a table.

If you are working in the area of digital forensics, you might have wondered about one particular thing in the marketing of many forensic solutions. While most manufacturers are claiming that their tools are easy to use and to learn, those very same manufacturers offer training courses with prices often exceeding the cost of the actual tools. Are these trainings necessary at all if the tools are as easy to use as the marketing claims?