Compelled Decryption: The East Asian Region
April 3rd, 2026 by Oleg Afonin
This piece marks the third installment in our ongoing series analyzing compelled decryption laws. As digital evidence continues to play a central role in modern investigations, legal systems worldwide are actively addressing the friction between encrypted devices and law enforcement access. For this chapter, our geographic focus shifts to East Asia. The region provides a highly practical comparative landscape for observing how neighboring jurisdictions weigh the technical demands of modern forensics against individual procedural rights. To map these diverse approaches, the following sections review the current legal mechanisms in mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea.
NVIDIA Pascal: a Great Password Cracking Tool
July 26th, 2016 by Oleg Afonin
During the last several years, progress on the CPU performance front has seemingly stopped. Granted, last-generation CPUs are cool, silent and power-efficient. Anecdotal evidence: my new laptop (a brand new Macbook) is about as fast as the Dell ultrabook it replaced. The problem? I bought the Dell laptop some five years ago. Granted, the Dell was thicker and noisier. It’s battery never lasted longer than a few hours. But it was about as fast as the new Macbook.
Elcomsoft Phone Viewer 2.20 Goes Stand-Alone
June 23rd, 2016 by Oleg Afonin
We have a bunch of mobile forensic tools. We have tools for extracting data from jailbroken iPhones and tools for decrypting password-protected backups. Tools for downloading data from iCloud and tools for analyzing user data mined by Google. We even have a tool for decrypting backups produced by BlackBerry 10, one of the most secure OS’es on the market.
Fingerprint Unlock Security: iOS vs. Google Android (Part II)
June 20th, 2016 by Oleg Afonin
Fingerprint Unlock Security: Google Android and Microsoft Hello
Elcomsoft System Recovery UEFI Support
June 16th, 2016 by Oleg Afonin
As you may already know, we’ve released an update to Elcomsoft System Recovery, a tool allowing to reset or recover Windows and Microsoft Account passwords by booting from an external USB drive. The new build allows creating bootable USB drives for devices exclusively relying on UEFI bootloaders. Why was this change needed? Read below for an answer!
Breaking BitLocker Encryption: Brute Forcing the Backdoor (Part I)
June 8th, 2016 by Vladimir Katalov
Investigators start seeing BitLocker encrypted volumes more and more often, yet computer users themselves may be genuinely unaware of the fact they’ve been encrypting their disk all along. How can you break into BitLocker encryption? Do you have to brute-force the password, or is there a quick hack to exploit?
Fingerprint Unlock Security: iOS vs. Google Android (Part I)
June 6th, 2016 by Oleg Afonin
Biometric approach to unlocking portable electronics has been on the rise since late 2013 when Apple released iPhone 5S. Ever since, manufacturers started adding fingerprint scanners to their devices. In the world of Android, this was frequently done without paying much (if any) attention to actual security. So how do these systems compare?
Dealing with a Locked iPhone
April 15th, 2016 by Oleg Afonin
So you’ve got an iPhone, and it’s locked, and you don’t know the passcode. This situation is so common, and the market has so many solutions and “solutions” that we felt a short walkthrough is necessary.
Apple Two-Factor Authentication vs. Two-Step Verification
April 1st, 2016 by Oleg Afonin
Two-step verification and two-factor authentication both aim to help users secure their Apple ID, adding a secondary authentication factor to strengthen security. While Apple ID and password are “something you know”, two-step verification (and two-factor authentication) are both based on “something you have”.
BitLocker: What’s New in Windows 10 November Update, And How To Break It
March 29th, 2016 by Oleg Afonin
BitLocker is a popular full-disk encryption scheme employed in all versions of Windows (but not in every edition) since Windows Vista. BitLocker is used to protect stationary and removable volumes against outside attacks. Since Windows 8, BitLocker is activated by default on compatible devices if the administrative account logs in with Microsoft Account credentials. BitLocker protection is extremely robust, becoming a real roadblock for digital forensics.
