The market of digital forensic tools is a tight one, just like any other niche market. The number of vendors is limited, especially when catering such specific needs as unlocking suspects’ handheld devices or breaking encryption. However, amidst the promises of cutting-edge technology and groundbreaking solutions, there are certain limitations that forensic vendors often don’t like to disclose to their customers. These limitations can have a significant impact on the applicability, effectiveness and reliability of the tools being offered.

Synology DSM 7.2 introduced a highly anticipated feature: volume-level encryption. This data protection mechanism works faster and has less limitations than shared folder encryption, which was the only encryption option supported in prior DSM releases. However, upon investigation, we determined that the implementation of the encryption key management mechanism for full-volume encryption fails to meet the expected standards of security for encrypted data for many users.

Intel has unveiled its latest lineup of dedicated graphics cards, driven by the powerful Intel Xe architecture. The Intel Arc series showcases impressive performance, rivaling mid-range offerings from competing brands, while maintaining an exceptional price-performance ratio that outperforms NVIDIA’s counterparts. In this article, we explore the potential of Intel Arc GPUs for forensic password recovery and delve into their performance capabilities, comparing them with both Intel’s built-in graphics and mid-range NVIDIA RTX boards.

As a provider of mobile forensic tools, we at Elcomsoft strongly believe in giving back to the community. Our iOS Forensic Toolkit (EIFT) is a highly complex and powerful mobile acquisition tool, consisting of almost eighty sub-projects, many of which are open source. While we have benefited from the contributions of the community, we also believe that it’s time to contribute back to the open source community by publishing our changes to those projects as required by their permissive license.

In recent years, Apple had switched from 4-digit PINs to 6 digits, while implementing blacklists of insecure PIN codes. How do these measures affect security, how much more security do six-digit PINs deliver compared to four-digit PINs, and do blacklists actually work? Let’s try to find out.

Elcomsoft iOS Forensic Toolkit 8.20 for Mac and 7.80 for Windows now includes a new mechanism for low-level access, which enables the extraction of certain parts of the file system from the latest Apple devices. This partial extraction raises questions regarding what data can and cannot be extracted and how missing information can be accessed. Learn about the partial file system extraction, its benefits and limitations.

Welcome to part 2 of the Perfect Acquisition series! In case you missed part 1, make sure to check it out before continuing with this article. In this section, we will dive deeper into iOS data protection and understand the obstacles we need to overcome in order to access the data, which in turn will help us accomplish a Perfect Acquisition when certain conditions are met.

Forensic acquisition has undergone significant changes in recent years. In the past, acquisition was relatively easy, with storage media easily separable and disk encryption not yet widespread. However, with the rise of mobile devices and their built-in encryption capabilities, acquiring data has become increasingly challenging. Traditional approaches like disk dumps are no longer feasible, and software exploitation has become the industry standard. Despite these methods, there are limitations to mobile acquisition, including the need to collaborate with the device, the possibility of hardware defects or deliberate data tampering. As a result, there is a need for continuous innovation in forensic acquisition to address these challenges and ensure accurate and reliable data collection.

Discover the benefits of agent-based data extraction from iOS devices. Learn about the purpose and development of the extraction agent, when it can be used, and best practices. Get a comprehensive understanding of the cutting-edge approach for iOS data extraction.

On January 23, 2023, Apple have released a bunch of system updates that target the different device architectures. iOS 16.3 is available for many recent devices, while older models were updated to iOS 12.5.7, iOS 15.7.3 and iPadOS 15.7.3 respectively. While Elcomsoft iOS Forensic Toolkit supported these versions of the system from the get go, today we are rolling out an update that irons out minor inconveniences when imaging such devices.