What can and what cannot be done with an iOS device using Touch ID/Face ID authentication as opposed to knowing the passcode? The differences are huge. For the sake of simplicity, we’ll only cover iOS 12 and 13. If you just want a quick summary, scroll down to the end of the article for a table.

If you are familiar with breaking passwords, you already know that different tools and file formats require a very different amount of efforts to break. Breaking a password protecting a RAR archive can take ten times as long as breaking a password to a ZIP archive with the same content, while breaking a Word document saved in Office 2016 can take ten times as long as breaking an Office 2010 document. With solutions for over 300 file formats and encryption algorithms, we still find iTunes backups amazing, and their passwords to be very different from the rest of the crop in some interesting ways. In this article we tried to gather everything we know about iTunes backup passwords to help you break (or reset) their passwords in the most efficient way.

Jailbreaking is used by the forensic community to access the file system of iOS devices, perform physical extraction and decrypt device secrets. Jailbreaking the device is one of the most straightforward ways to gain low-level access to many types of evidence not available with any other extraction methods.

Unless you’re using GrayShift or Cellebrite services for iPhone extraction, jailbreaking is a required pre-requisite for physical acquisition. Physical access offers numerous benefits over other types of extraction; as a result, jailbreaking is in demand among experts and forensic specialists.

The new generation of jailbreaks has arrived. Available for iOS 11 and iOS 12 (up to and including iOS 12.1.2), rootless jailbreaks offer significantly more forensically sound extraction compared to traditional jailbreaks. Learn how rootless jailbreaks are different to classic jailbreaks, why they are better for forensic extractions and what traces they leave behind.

The new generation of jailbreaks has arrived for iPhones and iPads running iOS 12. Rootless jailbreaks offer experts the same low-level access to the file system as classic jailbreaks – but without their drawbacks. We’ve been closely watching the development of rootless jailbreaks, and developed full physical acquisition support (including keychain decryption) for Apple devices running iOS 12.0 through 12.1.2. Learn how to install a rootless jailbreak and how to perform physical extraction with Elcomsoft iOS Forensic Toolkit.

The two recent jailbreaks, unc0ver and Electra, have finally enabled file system extraction for Apple devices running iOS 11.4 and 11.4.1. At this time, all versions of iOS 11 can be jailbroken regardless of hardware. Let’s talk about forensic consequences of today’s release: keychain and file system extraction.

In Apple’s world, the keychain is one of the core and most secure components of macOS, iOS and its derivatives such as watchOS and tvOS. The keychain is intended to keep the user’s most valuable secrets securely protected. This includes protection for authentication tokens, encryption keys, credit card data and a lot more. End users are mostly familiar with one particular feature of the keychain: the ability to store all kinds of passwords. This includes passwords to Web sites (Safari and third-party Web browsers), mail accounts, social networks, instant messengers, bank accounts and just about everything else. Some records (such as Wi-Fi passwords) are “system-wide”, while other records can be only accessed by their respective apps. iOS 12 further develops password auto-fill, allowing users to utilize passwords they stored in Safari in many third-party apps.

It’s been fast. iOS 11.3.1 and all earlier versions of the system down to iOS 11.2 have been successfully jailbroken. In addition, the jailbreak is compatible with iOS 11.4 beta 1 through 3. We normally wouldn’t post about each new jailbreak release; however, this time things are slightly different. The new Electra jailbreak uses two different exploits and presents two very different installation routines depending on whether or not you have a developer account with Apple. Considering how much more stable the developer-account exploit is compared to the routine available to the general public, this time it pays to be an Apple developer.

Apple has an article on their official Web site, warning users against jailbreaking iOS devices. The article “Unauthorized modification of iOS can cause security vulnerabilities, instability, shortened battery life, and other issues” is available at https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201954. How much truth is in that article, and is jailbreaking as dangerous as Apple claims? We’ll comment the article based on our extensive experience in jailbreaking more than a hundred devices running every version of iOS imaginable.