Archive for the ‘Hardware’ category

BitLocker, PGP and TrueCrypt set industry standard in the area of whole-disk and partition encryption. All three tools provide strong, reliable protection, and offer a perfect implementation of strong crypto.

Switching iPhones into a DFU (Device Firmware Update) mode is a hassle. Power off, press that and hold those that many seconds, release this but continue holding that until hopefully something happens on the phone. Many iPhone users have major troubles switching their iPhones into DFU mode. Luckily for them, they don’t have to do the Apple Dance too often.

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.

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.

In our previous blog post we have described how we broke the encryption in iOS devices. One important thing was left out of that article for the sake of readability, and that is how we actually acquire the image of the file system of the device. Indeed, in order to decrypt the file system, we need to extract it from the device first.

Most modern CPUs are multi-core – it is not easy to find even a laptop with less than two cores these days. And for desktops, 4 cores are usual now.

A true security system cannot be so fragile: Canon Original Data Security broken…