There has been a lot of noise regarding GrayKey news recently. GrayKey is an excellent appliance for iOS data extraction, and yes, it can help access more evidence. As always, the devil is in the detail.

A couple of quotes first, coming from the company who now partners with GrayShift to bundle their mobile forensic software (one of the best on the market, I would say) with GrayKey. They do support GrayKey-extracted data as well, and here is what they say:

“From the first iPhone extraction from GrayKey we were blown away with the amount of data they recovered”

“we’re seeing data we haven’t seen in years”

Actually, this is not exactly the case. Speaking of full file system acquisition, it’s been us who were the first on the market some 3 years ago, see Physical Acquisition for 64-bit Devices, iOS 9 Support.

Since then, we’ve been actively developing and updating iOS Forensic Toolkit, adding support for newer versions of iOS. We published a number of articles in our blog describing the benefits of file system extraction and what you can get: location data, cached mail, app-specific data, CPU and network usage data and much more.

Yes, we use the different approach, that requires jailbreaking (more on that later).

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