Unless you’re using GrayShift or Cellebrite services for iPhone extraction, jailbreaking is a required pre-requisite for physical acquisition. Physical access offers numerous benefits over other types of extraction; as a result, jailbreaking is in demand among experts and forensic specialists.

There has been a lot of noise regarding GrayKey news recently. GrayKey is an excellent appliance for iOS data extraction, and yes, it can help access more evidence. As always, the devil is in the detail.

WhatsApp remains one of the most popular instant messengers. With more than 1.5 billion users and about half billion daily active users, WhatsApp sends over 100 billion messages per day. WhatsApp is secure thanks to end-to-end encryption to make intercepted messages impossible to decrypt. While this is great news to consumers and privacy advocates, it is also bad news for the law enforcement. Once an expert accepts to access the suspect’s WhatsApp communication history, they will struggle with the encryption and demand for a vendor-provided backdoor (WhatsApp: The Bad Guys’ Secret Weapon).

In Apple’s world, the keychain is one of the core and most secure components of macOS, iOS and its derivatives such as watchOS and tvOS. The keychain is intended to keep the user’s most valuable secrets securely protected. This includes protection for authentication tokens, encryption keys, credit card data and a lot more. End users are mostly familiar with one particular feature of the keychain: the ability to store all kinds of passwords. This includes passwords to Web sites (Safari and third-party Web browsers), mail accounts, social networks, instant messengers, bank accounts and just about everything else. Some records (such as Wi-Fi passwords) are “system-wide”, while other records can be only accessed by their respective apps. iOS 12 further develops password auto-fill, allowing users to utilize passwords they stored in Safari in many third-party apps.

The boom in personal electronic devices recording literally every persons’ step introduced a new type of forensic evidence: the digital evidence. In this day and age, significantly more forensic evidence is available in digital form compared to physical evidence of yesteryear. Are law enforcement and intelligence agencies ready to handle the abundance of digital evidence? And more importantly, do frontline officers have the skills and technical expertise required to handle and preserve this wealth of information?

Health data is among the most important bits of information about a person. Health information is just as sensitive as the person’s passwords – and might be even more sensitive. It is only natural that health information is treated accordingly. Medical facilities are strictly regulated and take every possible security measure to restrict access to your medical records.

Heartrate, sleeping habits, workouts, steps and walking routines are just a few things that come to mind when we speak of Apple Health. Introduced in September 2014 with iOS 8, the Apple Health app is pre-installed on all iPhones. The app makes use of low-energy sensors, constantly collecting information about the user’s physical activities. With optional extra hardware (e.g. Apple Watch), Apple Health can collect significantly more information. In this article we’ll talk about the types of evidence collected by Apple Health, how they are stored and how to extract the data. (more…)

iMessage is undoubtedly one of the most popular instant messaging platforms for an obvious reason: it’s built in to iOS and ships with every iPhone by default. iMessage does not require complex setup, so the number of iMessage users is closely matching the number of iPhone users. Apple sells about 200 million iPhones every year, and the total number of iPhones sold is more than a billion. Unless you absolutely must chat with someone outside of Apple’s ecosystem (like those poor Android folks), you won’t need Skype, WhatsApp or Telegram. It’s also comforting to know that iMessage works everywhere around the world while most other messengers are oppressed in one or more countries.

The iPhone Xs employs a revised version of the OLED panel we’ve seen in last year’s iPhone X. The iPhone Xs Max uses a larger, higher-resolution version of the panel. Both panels feature higher peak brightness compared to the OLED panel Apple used in the iPhone X. While OLED displays are thinner and more power-efficient compared to their IPS counterparts, most OLED displays (including those installed in the iPhone Xs and Xs max) will flicker at lower brightness levels. The screen flickering is particularly visible in low ambient brightness conditions, and may cause eyestrain with sensitive users. The OLED flickering issue is still mostly unheard of by most consumers. In this article we will demystify OLED display flickering and provide a step by step instruction on how to conveniently disable (and re-enable) PWM flickering on iPhone Xs and Xs Max displays to reduce eyestrain. (more…)

Working in a mobile forensic company developing tools for iCloud forensics, logical and physical extraction of iPhone devices, we don’t live another day without being asked if (or “how”) we can help remove iCloud lock from a given iPhone. Without throwing a definite “yes” or “no” (or “just buy this tool”), we’ve decided to gather everything we know about bypassing, resetting and disabling iCloud activation lock on recent Apple devices.