The iPhone is one of the most popular smartphone devices. Thanks to its huge popularity, the iPhone gets a lot of attention from the forensic community. Multiple acquisition methods exist, allowing forensic users to obtain more or less information with more or less efforts. Some of these acquisition methods are based on undocumented exploits and public jailbreaks, while some other methods utilize published APIs to access information. In this article, we’ll compare the types and amounts of data one can extract from the same 256-GB iPhone 11 Pro Max using three different acquisition methods: advanced logical, full file system and iCloud extraction.

Geolocation data can provide a wealth of evidence to various government agencies. Law enforcement agencies use location data to help place suspects near a crime scene in a given time frame. However, the use of location is not limited to criminal or civil investigations. Emergency response services use geolocation to locate persons, taxi and delivery services use location to improve service. There are many more examples where location evidence is vital. Recently, governments have started using (or are considering using) geolocation data to help identify and isolate infected citizens. Where does the location evidence come from and how one can extract it?

Last week, Microsoft Edge has become the second most popular desktop Web browser based on NetMarketShare usage figures. The new, Chromium-powered Edge offers impressive levels of customization and performance, much better compatibility with Web sites. The new browser is available on multiple platforms including older versions of Windows. With Chromium-based Edge quickly gaining momentum, we felt the urge of researching its protected storage.

Password managers such as LastPass are designed from the ground up to withstand brute-force attacks on the password database. Using encryption and thousands of hash iterations, the protection is made to slow down access to the encrypted vault that contains all of the user’s stored passwords. In this article, we’ll demonstrate how to unlock LastPass password vault instantly without running a length attack.

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.

We recently introduced a new acquisition method for iPhone and iPad devices. The fast, simple and safe extraction agent requires no jailbreak, and delivers the full file system image and the keychain. The latest release of Elcomsoft iOS Forensic Toolkit expanded this method to iOS 13 and filled the gaps in some versions of iOS 12 that were missing support (such as iOS 12.3 and 12.4.1). Finally, we now officially support the latest generation of iPhone devices including the iPhone 11, iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro. The new compatibility matrix becomes significantly more diverse with this release, so bear with us to learn which iOS devices can be extracted without a jailbreak.

In our recent article iPhone Acquisition Without a Jailbreak I mentioned that agent-based extraction requires the use of an Apple ID that has been registered in Apple’s Developer Program. Participation is not free and comes with a number of limitations. Why do you need to become a “developer”, what are the limitations, and is there a workaround? Read along to find out.

The popular unc0ver jailbreak has been updated to v4, and this is quite a big deal. The newest update advertises support for the latest A12 and A13 devices running iOS 13 through 13.3. The current version of iOS is 13.3.1. None of the older versions (including iOS 13.3) are signed, but still there are a lot of A12/A12X/A13 devices floating around. Until now, file system and keychain extraction was a big problem. The newest unc0ver jailbreak makes it possible.

We have updated Elcomsoft Cloud Explorer, our Google Account extraction tool, with Google Fit support. Google Fit is a relatively little known Google service aimed at tracking the user’s health and physical activities. In line with pretty much every other Google service, Google Fit synchronizes massive amounts of data with the user’s Google Account, storing activity-related information collected by all of the user’s devices in a single place. When extracting these data, we discovered massive amounts of location points stored alongside with information related to the user’s physical activities. Learn what is stored in Google Fit and how to extract it from the cloud!

Just days ago, we have reviewed the data stored in iCloud, and studied its encryption mechanisms. We also discussed the discrepancies between the data that is stored in the cloud and the data that’s provided to the law enforcement. In case you missed it, make sure to check out Apple vs. Law Enforcement: Cloud Forensics. Today, the differences are great; Apple is using point-to-point encryption to protect certain types of data. However, it has not always been that way. Apple security model changed year after year. This article reviews the timeline of Apple security changes over time.