The past two years introduced a number of challenges forensic experts have never faced before. In 2018, Apple made it more difficult for the police to safely transport a seized iPhone to the lab by locking the USB port with USB restricted mode, making data preservation a challenge. The release of the A12 platform, also in 2018, made it difficult to unlock iOS devices protected with an unknown password, while this year’s release of iOS 13 rendered unlock boxes useless on iPhones based on the two most recent platforms.

WhatsApp remains one of the most popular instant messengers. With more than 1.5 billion users and about half billion daily active users, WhatsApp sends over 100 billion messages per day. WhatsApp is secure thanks to end-to-end encryption to make intercepted messages impossible to decrypt. While this is great news to consumers and privacy advocates, it is also bad news for the law enforcement. Once an expert accepts to access the suspect’s WhatsApp communication history, they will struggle with the encryption and demand for a vendor-provided backdoor (WhatsApp: The Bad Guys’ Secret Weapon).

An update to Google Play Services enables manual Google Drive backup option on many Android handsets. Since Android 6.0, Android has had an online backup solution, allowing Android users back up and restore their device settings and app data from their Google Drive account. Android backups were running on top of Google Play Services; in other words, they were always part of Google Android as opposed to being part of Android Open Source. Unlike iOS with predictable iCloud backups and the manual “Backup now” option, Google’s backup solution behaved inconsistently at best. In our (extensive) tests, we discovered that the first backup would be only made automatically on the second day, while data for most applications would be backed up days, if not weeks after the initial backup. The ability to manually initiate a backup was sorely missing. (more…)

We have already covered the emergency SOS mode introduced in iOS 11. When entering this mode, the phone disables Touch ID and Face ID, requiring the passcode to unlock the phone. It appears that Google is taking cues from Apple, adding a new Lockdown Option to the newly released Android 9 Pie. Let us see what is similar and what is different between iOS SOS mode and Android 9.0 Pie Lockdown Option.

Numerous vendors advertise many types of solutions for extracting evidence from Android devices. The companies claim to support tens of thousands of models, creating the impression that most (if not all) Android devices can be successfully acquired using one method or another.

After testing waters for more than a year, Google has finally pulled the plug and began blocking access to Google Play services on uncertified devices. Why Google took this step, who is affected, and what it means for the end users? Let’s try to find out.

With over 1.3 billion monthly users, WhatsApp is the most popular instant messaging tool worldwide, and Android is the most popular mobile operating system by far. This makes WhatsApp acquisition from Android devices essential for the law enforcement. Elcomsoft Explorer for WhatsApp 2.30 can now download and decrypt Android user’s encrypted WhatsApp communication histories stored in Google Drive. If you have access to the user’s trusted phone number or their physical SIM card (to receive a verification code from WhatsApp), you can now use Elcomsoft Explorer for WhatsApp to download, decrypt and display WhatsApp communication histories backed up into the user’s Google Account. Surprisingly, a cloud backup may, in certain cases, contain even more information than stored on the device itself. This particularly applies to attachments (photos and videos) sent and received by WhatsApp users and then deleted from the device.

Software updates remain a sore point for the 86 per cent of consumers who are using Android-based smartphones. Both Apple and Microsoft have significantly different update policies, mostly allowing the companies to deliver updates directly to their customers. There is much more to these updates than just the Android (or Windows) version. With numerous versions, subversions and carrier modified versions of the phone’s software, experts may struggle when attempting physical extraction. Let us have a look at the differences between the three mobile operating systems, their update policies and the challenges they present to the forensic examiner.

Today’s mobile devices are getting increasingly more resistant to physical imaging, mostly due to the use of full-disk encryption. Full-disk encryption makes useless some low-level acquisition techniques of yesterday, which includes JTAG and chip-off.

In each major Android update, Google improves security on the one hand, and moves a few more things to the cloud on the other. The recently finalized and finally released Android 8.0 Oreo adds one important thing to all devices running the newest build of Google’s OS: the ability to back up SMS text messages into the user’s Google Account.