iOS 4 iPhone Encryption Broken By Russian Forensic Experts

Russian forensic experts team named ElcomSoft is able to crack Apple iOS 4 iPhone Encryption including backup file encryption and on device data security. The team is also involved to provide software services that are used by law enforcement and certain three-letter agencies. They used some GPU-accelerated Phone Password Breaker tool to remove protection for BlackBerry and Apple backups.

After the iOS 4, Apple was providing 256-bit encryption to secure iPhone devices. As this encryption has been cracked now, what is the next step Apple is going to take for better security? 512-bit encryption ??

Katalov explains that �Decryption is not possible without having access to the actual device because we need to obtain the encryption keys that are stored in (or computed by) the device and are not dumped or stored during typical physical acquisition”

According to the security team, decryption can not be done without having access to the actual device as they have to get encryption keys stored in the device.

The keys include:

Keys computed from the unique device key (UID), which is believed to be embedded in the hardware and is not extractable (so-called keys 0�835 and 0x89B);
User passcode key which is derived from users� passcode using the unique device key (UID);
Escrow key(s) which are derived from escrow pairing records using the unique device key (UID);
Effaceable storage area which stores number of encryption keys.

For more details you can check the official website here.

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iOS 4 iPhone Encryption Broken By Russian Forensic Experts

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