Perfect Acquisition Part 5: Perfect APFS Acquisition
July 21st, 2025 by Elcomsoft R&D
Welcome to Part 5 of the Perfect Acquisition series! In case you missed the previous parts, please check them out for background information. This section provides a comprehensive guide to performing the Perfect APFS Acquisition procedure.
checkm8 Extraction: iPhone 7
July 28th, 2022 by Vladimir Katalov
Elcomsoft iOS Forensic Toolkit supports checkm8 extraction from all compatible devices ranging from the iPhone 4s and all the way through the iPhone X (as well as the corresponding iPad, iPod Touch, Apple Watch and Apple TV models). The new update removes an important obstacle to the acquisition of the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus devices running recent versions of iOS.
Apple TV 4K Keychain and Full File System Acquisition
July 20th, 2022 by Vladimir Katalov
Mobile forensics is not limited to phones and tablets. Many types of other gadgets, including IoT devices, contain tons of valuable data. Such devices include smart watches, media players, routers, smart home devices, and so on. In this article, we will cover the extraction of an Apple TV 4K, one of the most popular digital media players.
Building an Efficient Password Recovery Workstation: Power Savings and Waste Heat Management
July 15th, 2022 by Oleg Afonin
This article continues the series of publications aimed to help experts specify and build economical and power-efficient workstations for password recovery workloads. Electricity costs, long-term reliability and warranty coverage must be considered when building a password recovery workstation. In this article we will review the most common cooling solutions found in today’s GPUs, and compare consumer-grade video cards with their much lesser known professional counterparts.
Building an Efficient Password Recovery Workstation: NVIDIA RTX Passwords-per-Watt Benchmarks
July 8th, 2022 by Oleg Afonin
This article opens the series of publications aimed to help experts specify and build effective and power-efficient workstations for brute-forcing passwords. Power consumption and power efficiency are two crucial parameters that are often overlooked in favor of sheer speed. When building a workstation with 24×7 workload, absolute performance numbers become arguably less important compared to performance per watt. We measured the speed and power consumption of seven video cards ranging from the NVIDIA Quadro T600 to NVIDIA RTX 3070 Ti and calculated their efficiency ratings.
Keychain: the Gold Mine of Apple Mobile Devices
July 7th, 2022 by Vladimir Katalov
Keychain is an essential part of iOS and macOS that securely stores the most critical data: passwords of all kinds, encryption keys, certificates, credit card numbers, and more. Extracting and decrypting the keychain, when possible, is a must in mobile forensics. We seriously improved this part in the latest build of iOS Forensic Toolkit.
iCloud backups: the Dark Territory
July 5th, 2022 by Vladimir Katalov
Apple ecosystem includes a comprehensive backup ecosystem that includes both local and cloud backups, and data synchronization with end-to-end encryption for some categories. Today we’ll discuss the iCloud backups, particularly targeting issues that are not covered in the official documentation.
Full File System and Keychain Acquisition: What, When, and How
June 28th, 2022 by Vladimir Katalov
We often write about full file system acquisition, yet we rarely explain what it is, when you can do it, and which methods you can use. We decided to clarify low-level extraction of Apple mobile devices (iPhones and iPads, and some other IoT devices such as Apple TVs and Apple Watches).
GPU Acceleration: Attacking Passwords with NVIDIA RTX Series Boards
June 24th, 2022 by Oleg Afonin
Today’s data protection methods utilize many thousands (sometimes millions) hash iterations to strengthen password protection, slowing down the attacks to a crawl. Consumer-grade video cards are commonly used for GPU acceleration. How do these video cards compare, and what about the price-performance ratio? We tested five reasonably priced NVIDIA boards ranging from the lowly GTX 1650 to RTX 3060 Ti.
Logical Acquisition: Not as Simple as It Sounds
June 23rd, 2022 by Vladimir Katalov
Speaking of mobile devices, especially Apple’s, “logical acquisition” is probably the most misused term. Are you sure you know what it is and how to properly use it, especially if you are working in mobile forensics? Let us shed some light on it.
checkm8 Extraction: the iPads, iPods, and TVs
June 21st, 2022 by Oleg Afonin
The ninth beta of iOS Forensic Toolkit 8.0 for Mac introduces forensically sound, checkm8-based extraction of sixteen iPad, iPod Touch and Apple TV models. The low-level extraction solution is now available for all iPad and all iPod Touch models susceptible to the checkm8 exploit.
