We were attending the DFRWS EU forum in beautiful Florence, and held a workshop on iOS forensics. During the workshop, an attendee tweeted a photo of the first slide of our workshop, and the first response was from… one of our competitors. He said “Looking forward to the “Accessing a locked device” slide”. You can follow our conversation on Twitter, it is worth reading.

No, we cannot break the iPhone passcode. Still, sometimes we can get the data out of a locked device. The most important point is: we never keep our methods secret. We always provide full disclosure about what we do, how our software works, what the limitations are, and what exactly you can expect if you use this and that tool. Speaking of Apple iCloud, we even reveal technical information about Apple’s network and authentication protocols, data storage formats and encryption. If we cannot do something, we steer our customers to other companies (including competitors) who could help. Such companies include Oxygen Forensics (the provider of one of the best mobile forensic products) and Passware (the developer of excellent password cracking tools and our direct competitor).

Let’s start with “Logical acquisition”. We posted about it more than once, but it never hurts to go over it again. By “Logical acquisition”, vendors usually mean nothing more than making an iTunes-style backup of the phone, full stop.

Then, there is that “advanced logical” advertised by some forensic companies. There’s that “method 2” acquisition technique and things with similarly cryptic names. What is that all about?

I am not the one to tell you how other software works (not because I don’t know, but because I don’t feel it would be ethical), but I’ll share information on how we do it with our software: the methods we use, the limitations, and the expected outcome.

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