ElcomSoft's New Discovery Delivers Faster Forensic Access to Data Backed Up by iOS 10 Devices

MOSCOW, September 23, 2016 /PRNewswire/ --

ElcomSoft Co. Ltd. updatesElcomsoft Phone Breaker 6.10, the company's mobile acquisition tool, providing forensic specialists the ability to unlock iOS 10 backups significantly faster compared to iOS 9. The new discovery in iOS 10 backups potentially allows recovery speeds thousands of times faster compared to password-protected iOS 9 backups.

"All versions of iOS prior to iOS 10 used to use extremely robust protection," says Vladimir Katalov, ElcomSoft CEO. "Chances of recovering a long, complex password were slim, and even then a high-end GPU would be needed to accelerate the recovery. As a result of our discovery, we can now break iOS 10 backup passwords much faster even without GPU acceleration. This is no doubt great news for law enforcement and digital forensic specialists around the globe."

iOS 10 Backups: Significantly Weaker Protection 

Changes in iOS 10 allow for much faster enumeration of backup passwords. iOS 9 backups were slightly more than 150,000 passwords per second using a powerful NVIDIA GTX 1080 accelerator. For iOS 10, Elcomsoft Phone Breaker peaks at 6 million passwords per second using a CPU alone without the help of a GPU.

This means that a truly random, 6-character alphanumerical password (single-case letters) protecting iOS 10 backup will only take a few minutes to break. Add an extra character, and it still takes several hours to brute-force, which is also very reasonable. For reference, the same 7-character password protecting an iOS 9 backup would take almost a week to break.

Benchmarks 

The following benchmarks were obtained for iOS 9 and iOS 10 backups using the same hardware.

• iOS 9 (CPU): 2,400 passwords per second (Intel i5) 
• iOS 9 (GPU): 150,000 passwords per second (NVIDIA GTX 1080) 
• iOS 10 (CPU): 6,000,000 passwords per second (Intel i5) 

About Elcomsoft Phone Breaker 

Elcomsoft Phone Breaker is a mobile forensic tool helping law enforcement specialists to extract information from offline and cloud backups created by Apple, BlackBerry and Windows devices.

About ElcomSoft Co. Ltd. 

Founded in 1990, ElcomSoft Co.Ltd. develops state-of-the-art computer forensics tools, provides computer forensics training and computer evidence consulting services. Since 1997, ElcomSoft has been providing support to businesses, law enforcement, military, and intelligence agencies. ElcomSoft tools are used by most of the Fortune 500 corporations, multiple branches of the military all over the world, foreign governments, and all major accounting firms.

Contact: Olga Koksharova, [email protected] , fax US, toll-free: +1-866 448-2703, UK +44-870-831-2983.

SOURCE ELCOMSOFT Co. Ltd.