DCAWD.com

Russian company ElcomSoft is claiming to have cracked the 256-bit hardware encryption Apple uses to protect the data on iOS 4 devices, and is offering software that allows anyone to do it.

ElcomSoft is well-known as a corporate security and IT audit company, working with law enforcement agencies, the military, and intelligence agencies to recover data and perform forensics on devices. Its latest work has managed to open up the data stored on any device running iOS 4 by circumventing the hardware encryption chip Apple uses.

Rather than relying on a hardware dump from such a device, which will be encrypted and may be missing some of the important data a forensic investigation needs, ElcomSoft can now gain full access to what is stored on a gadget such as the iPhone 4. This includes historical information such as geolocation data, browsing history, call history, text messages and emails, usernames, and passwords. They can even recover data deleted by the user from the device.

Until now, anyone running an iOS 4 device has been safe in the knowledge their data was protected and the encryption too strong to be cracked in any usable timeframe. What ElcomSoft did was to create a toolkit that allows for the extraction of the encryption keys from such a device. With those keys it’s possible to decrypt an image taken from an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. Once that is done a forensic tool such as FTK or Guidance EnCase can be used to look at the data in great detail.