Stated plainly: iOS Forensic Toolkit can now get past Stolen Device Protection. There is a catch, and it belongs up front: this is not a magic unlock, and anyone selling it as one is selling something. What we have built is a way to install the extraction agent without ever pairing the iPhone to the workstation over a USB port. Because the most disruptive thing SDP does to a forensic workflow is place Face ID or Touch ID in front of that pairing step, bypassing the pairing step bypasses the gate. You still need the device passcode, a paid Apple Developer account, and a device you are authorized to examine. With those in hand, SDP is no longer the wall it was a month ago.

A new update to iOS Forensic Toolkit is out. The headline feature is an alternative installation method for the extraction agent – that is, deploying it onto an iPhone while bypassing the mandatory pairing requirement. The agent can now be delivered across the network, which removes a number of limitations that came with the usual cable-based installation. One requirement up front: the device must already be unlocked – in other words, the passcode must be known. This method does not work with a fully locked iPhone.

If you extract data from iPhones for a living, Stolen Device Protection is the change you can no longer afford to ignore. It does something deceptively simple: it puts Face ID or Touch ID in front of the “Trust This Computer” prompt. The practical result is that an examiner who knows the device passcode still cannot pair an unfamiliar iPhone to a forensic workstation. That is the most disruptive change Apple has made to iPhone pairing behavior in roughly a decade, and as of spring 2026 it is switched on out of the box.

Over the years, we have published several articles about the extraction agent. However, the underlying technology changes quickly, and incremental changes often have significant cumulative effects. As a result, many of our older posts are no longer relevant and can be misleading if followed to the letter today. While last year’s recap, Installing and Troubleshooting the Extraction Agent (2025), remains a solid foundation for general setup, it does not account for the most recent hardware and software developments. This article serves as the definitive point of reference, providing an up-to-date recap of everything you need to know about the extraction agent as of May 2026.

We updated iOS Forensic Toolkit, adding low-level extraction support for iOS 26 and 26.0.1 via the extraction agent. This support is available for most iPhones and iPads compatible with the iOS 26 branch with a notable exception of the iPhone 17 range and M5-based iPads. Why exactly are these devices exempt, and what else did Apple do to make iOS 26 tougher and more resistant? Let’s find out.

We’ve just updated iOS Forensic Toolkit to version 10.0, significantly expanding its low-level extraction capabilities for both the extraction agent and bootloader-based methods. Previously, agent-based extraction was capped at iOS 16.6.1. This release finally covers the remainder of the iOS 16 branch, and adds support for the entire iOS 17  branch as well as iOS 18 through 18.7.1. We have also expanded checkm8 support to cover all the latest OS updates pushed by Apple on devices susceptible to the exploit. Finally, we improved extended logical acquisition support for iOS/iPadOS 26, now pulling significantly more shared data than before.

The release of the checkm8 exploit was a breakthrough for mobile forensics, finally granting investigators verifiable access to the file systems of various Apple devices. This accessibility established the current “gold standard” for extraction: using the bootloader exploit to access the file system and dump it into a simple tar archive. While convenient, a tar archive is merely a logical copy, not a physical one. It may fail to capture the device’s true state, missing certain low-level nuances. Truth be told, these nuances are rarely relevant to real investigations, but why settle for less when a better method is available? More importantly, this approach avoids the “teething problems” of traditional bootloader extraction – such as the mishandling of large sparse files – that continue to plague even the largest forensic vendors.

Big news is coming – and this time, it’s from the living room. Our team has successfully extracted a complete file system image from an Apple TV 4K running tvOS 26. This marks the first-ever low-level extraction of Apple’s 26th-generation operating systems, including iOS 26, iPadOS 26, and tvOS 26. No one – not even the major forensic players! – has been able to achieve this before.

Our customers often ask us which exact iOS versions are supported by iOS Forensic Toolkit. There’s always a temptation to answer “all of them,” and while that answer is technically correct, there are a lot of caveats. The devil is in the details, and the real answer depends on what you mean by “support”.

The latest update to iOS Forensic Toolkit brought bootloader-level extraction to a bunch of old iPads, Apple TVs, and even the first-gen HomePod running OS versions 17 and 18. This enabled full file system and keychain extraction on a those older Apple devices that can still run these versions of the OS.