Archive for the ‘Elcom-News’ Category

BlackBerry password cracking: multi-threaded, with hardware-accelerated AES

Thursday, December 9th, 2010

Most modern CPUs are multi-core – it is not easy to find even a laptop with less than two cores these days. And for desktops, 4 cores are usual now.

Password recovery is one of most CPU-intensive tasks, and it fits best into multi-processor architecture. Every CPU (or CPU core) get its own portion of passwords to try (i.e. to check their validness), and they all work in parallel. As simple as that.

So what we’re doing in our software is running multiple threads – as many as the number of CPUs (or cores) available. And the rest is being done by the operating system, that assigns the threads to cores (well, in most cases we don’t care what particular core is going to execute a particular thread, because they are all equal; the only exception is when one or more of the cores is doing something already, I mean something CPU-intensive as well).

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Canon cannot or mustn’t provide image validation feature?

Tuesday, November 30th, 2010

A true security system cannot be so fragile: Canon Original Data Security broken…

Find 3 differences from original Now if your partner gets a compromising anonymous image where you are enjoying yourself with nice blond with blue eyes or charming young man, don’t panic and don’t get upset, you can easily prove it is just a fake (even if it’s not ;) ).  Seriously, how can we trust photographic evidence in the era of Photoshop and other designer tools? The genuineness of a digital image can only be proven by special digital tools…like OSK-E3?

Unfortunately or maybe fortunately, it turned out that OSK-E3 (Canon Original Data Security Kit) cannot guarantee image authenticity, because now it can recognize even fake images as true and genuine. However, the problem is not in OSK-E3, it is in Canon Original Data Security system implemented in most modern Canon DSLR (Digital Single-Lens Reflex) cameras.

Now it’s possible (well, Dmitry did it recently and who knows if somebody could do it earlier ;) ) to dump camera’s memory, extract secret keys from the camera, and calculate ODD (= Original Decision Data) which answer for any changes done to the image. And thus name the modified image as original one.

What Canon can do? It seems like Canon can nothing do with their models right now, because the fundamental problem lies not in the software. Changing the software could possibly solve the question, until someone again finds its vulnerability. But adding cryptoprocessors that won’t expose the secret key and thus will prevent from any penetrations from outside would close the loophole.

Have a look at some of our fake images that pass verification test by OSK-E3: http://www.elcomsoft.com/canon.html

So, can you now trust Canon’s OSK decision if an image is original or not?

Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Chrome Passwords Cracked

Thursday, November 11th, 2010

What is a Web browser for you? It’s virtually a whole world, all together: web sites, blogging, photo and video sharing, social networks, instant messaging, shopping… did I forget anything? Oh yes, logins and passwords. :)  Set an account here, sign in there, register here and sing up there – everywhere you need logins and passwords to confirm your identity.

Yesterday, we recovered login and password information to Internet Explorer only, but it was yesterday… Now, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Google Chrome and Opera Web browsers are at your disposal.

Let’s plunge into some figures…

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Smartphone Forensics: Cracking BlackBerry Backup Passwords

Thursday, September 30th, 2010

BlackBerry dominates the North American smartphone market, enjoying almost 40 per cent market share. A 20 per cent worldwide market share isn’t exactly a bad thing, too. The total subscriber base for the BlackBerry platform is more than 50 million users.

Today, we are proud to present world’s first tool to facilitate forensic analysis of BlackBerry devices by enabling access to protected data stored on users’ BlackBerries.

One of the reasons of BlackBerry high popularity is its ultimate security. It was the only commercial mobile communication device that was ever allowed to a US president: Barack Obama has won the privilege to keep his prized BlackBerry despite resistance from NSA. (On a similar note, Russian president Dmitry Medvedev was handed an iPhone 4 a day before its official release by no one but Steve Jobs himself. No worries, we crack those, too).

 

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Peeking Inside Keychain Secrets

Thursday, August 5th, 2010

Today we have released Elcomsoft iPhone Password Breaker 1.20 which introduces two new features and fixes few minor issues.

Keychain Explorer

This feature allows to view contents of keychain included with encrypted device backup.

Mac users are probably familiar with concept of keychain — it is a centralized, system-wide storage where application can store information they consider sensitive. Typically, such information includes passwords, encryption keys and certificates, but in principle it can be anything. Data in keychain is cryptographically protected by OS and user password is required to access it. The closest Windows equivalent for keychain is probably Data Protection API.

iOS-based devices also have a keychain, but instead of user password, embedded cryptographic key is used to protect its contents. This key is unique to each device and so far there are no way to reliably extract it from the device.

Apple recommends iOS application developers to use keychain for storing passwords and other sensitive information, and one reason for this is that it never leaves device unencrypted. Here’s an excerpt from Keychain Service Programming Guide:

In iOS, an application always has access to its own keychain items and does not have access to any other application’s items. The system generates its own password for the keychain, and stores the key on the device in such a way that it is not accessible to any application. When a user backs up iPhone data, the keychain data is backed up but the secrets in the keychain remain encrypted in the backup. The keychain password is not included in the backup. Therefore, passwords and other secrets stored in the keychain on the iPhone cannot be used by someone who gains access to an iPhone backup. For this reason, it is important to use the keychain on iPhone to store passwords and other data (such as cookies) that can be used to log into secure web sites.

Prior to iOS 4 keychain was also included in the backup ‘”as is”, i.e. all data inside was encrypted using unique device key. This meant that it was not possible to restore keychain onto another device — it will try to decrypt data with key which is different from one used to encrypt data. Naturally, this will fail and all data in keychain will be lost.

To address this issue, Apple changed the way keychain backup works in iOS 4. Now, if you’re creating encrypted backup (i.e. you’ve set up a password to protect backup) then keychain data will be re-encrypted using encryption key derived from backup password and thus ca be restored on another device (provided backup password, of course). If you haven’t set backup password, then everything works like before iOS 4 — keychain encrypted on device key is included in the backup.

Elcomsoft iPhone Password Breaker now allows you to view contents of keychain from encrypted backup of devices running iOS 4. You will need to provide password, of course. Here’s screenshot of Keychain Explorer showing (some) contents of my iPhone’s keychain:

Keychain Explorer 

There are passwords for all Wi-Fi hotspots I have ever joined (and haven’t pushed “Forget this Network” button), for my email, Twitter, and WordPress accounts, as well as Safari saved passwords and even my Lufthansa frequent flyer number and password! :) And I don’t use Facebook/LinkedIn/anything else on my phone — otherwise I guess credentials for those will be also included in the keychain.

Keychain Explorer will work only against backup which is encrypted. If you happen to have an iOS 4 device and want to get password from it — set a backup password in iTunes, backup device, use Keychain Explorer to view and/or export keychain passwords, and, finally, remove backup password in iTunes.

Password Cache

This feature is far less exciting than Keychain Explorer, but we believe it should improve user experience with Elcomsoft iPhone Password Breaker.

The idea is simple: all passwords which are found by EPPB or which are used to open backup in Keychain Explorer are stored in password cache. When you later try to open backup in Keychain Explorer or recover a backup password, program first checks password cache for correct password.

Passwords in cache are stored using secure encryption.

 

Also, there is a new EPPB FAQ online. Worth reading if you’re thinking of purchasing EPPB or want to learn more about it.

There is at least one really big update for EPPB coming in September or October, so stay tuned!

International System Administrator Appreciation Day

Friday, July 30th, 2010

Click to enlarge

Today we congratulate all system administrators and those substituting them when these are busy with "the most important problem" of someone else's. We wish you great health and nerve in your multi-tasking job.

Thank you!!

Our P.U.B. survey goes on, we'll be very much obliged for your ticks

Something new….

Thursday, July 15th, 2010

According to the preliminary results of our latest questionnaire (ElcomSoft Customer Reference program Questionnaire) the majority of people forget their passwords when returned from holidays, thus being blocked out from the precious information they have on the PC.
I bet that lots of people found themselves or those around in a similar situation at least once. Let me share my personal experience with you. One of my friends, having returned from the vacation in a tropical paradise, was pleased to see a new computer at her desk (while she was away the company renewed some of the machines) and at the same time very much discouraged and upset to find out that many of her passwords remained in her old pc and she didn't bother herself to save them anywhere else. So the access to the mail account from her new modern PC was forbidden, as well as access to several password-protected websites (from social networks to online banking).  Nothing to be happy with, isn’t it?!! But such a story no longer has a sad ending due to the release of Elcom’s new recovery tool, namely ElcomSoft Internet Password Breaker. In the above described situation EINPB revealed necessary passwords stored in the old computer, thus letting a person replace the password-protected data from one machine to another.  One more important remark in this respect is that my friend didn’t have to seek help of the “user-unfriendly sysadmin” :)

What’s special about EINPB? Let’s have a quick jog through some of its features. Our new tool instantly reveals cached passwords to Web sites in Microsoft Internet Explorer, mailbox & identity passwords in lots of Microsoft versions. It as well supports the new security model employed by Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 and 8.

Think it can be of any interest for you, please visit our site http://www.elcomsoft.com & learn more about EINPB at http://einpb.elcomsoft.com.

0-day

Monday, June 21st, 2010

It’s been two weeks since Steve Jobs has announced release of new iPhone 4 and iOS 4 operating system during his keynote on WWDC’2010. New iPhone will begin shipping on Thursday, 24th of June, and new iOS will become available for download today, just few hours are left.

iOS 4 comes packed with a lot of nice features (long-awaited multitasking, background location services, iBooks and much improved Mail app  just to name a few) and we are very pleased to announce today the release of the new version of Elcomsoft iPhone Password Breaker with support for iTunes 9.2 and iOS 4.

Elcomsoft iPhone Password Breaker (or EPPB for short) is a utility to recover passwords for encrypted and password-protected iPhone/iPod/iPad backups created with iTunes (please note that it’s not meant to recover or remove passcode lock on the device).

With iOS 4 Apple has completely changed the way backups are encrypted and stored. Backup and restore processes are way much faster now. Apple have also improved protection against password recovery attacks, thus making our job harder (password recovery is about 5x slower for new backups than for older ones).

We at Elcomsoft try our best to keep up with the times, so most of our tools & programs are adjusted to the latest technologically advanced features. The EPPB is not an exception, new version of EPPB fully supports both old and new backup formats. It also supports hardware acceleration using NVIDIA and ATI GPUs and Tableau TACC1441.

Password Usage Behavior Survey, Take 2

Tuesday, June 15th, 2010

Hello! Yet again, we have launched a survey on password usage behavior.

As our previous survey went like a breeze (you will find the report in our archives), it is a logical next step that we decide to try one more time. From the very first survey we gained curious info, which was also interesting to publicity. Naturally questions about password protection are numerous and some of them remain dark, possibly a little too much so, that is why we are tempted to undertake one more “investigation”.

This time we expanded on questions and made some of them hypothetical, where you are put into a situation to find a way out. It is interesting to trace your way of thinking on both hypothetical and actual matters, so other questions are suggested to understand your attitude to real everyday situations you have to deal with.

As usually, survey completion will be finalized by a report.

We tried not to inundate our questionnaire with baffling questions, but if you still consider it time-consuming, you are welcome to answer one absurdly simple question on home page of ElcomSoft website.

C’mon you are within an ace of getting 10% discount for all our software; just find a little will-power to put a couple of ticks. Again, thank you for taking time from your busy day and completing our questionnaire.  And feel free to channel this survey to your friends and colleagues.

Best of luck!

Elcomsoft iPhone Password Breaker

Friday, May 7th, 2010

Last week we have released our new product, EPPB, out of beta. We have fixed some bugs, polished GPU acceleration support, added support for Tableau TACC1441 hardware accelerator, making this program the world's first program capable of utilizing computing power of GPUs both from ATI and NVIDIA as well as dedicated hardware accelerators aimed primarily on computer forensics specialists. We have also included ability to run brute-force attacks and not only wordlist-based attacks. Latter were improved with ability to enable/disable individual types of password mutations and set customized level to any of them.

The last, but not the least, we have found that EPPB can handle encrypted backups from Apple's newest tablet, iPad (thanks to Apple for using the same underlying technologies for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad).

Apple iPad

P.S. If anyone's interested, we think that iPad is really cool gadget. It's not a substitute for a laptop, but it's great for catching on emails, surfing web, watching photos or videos or movies and for reading books. And multitouch on 10'' screen is awesome :) .

P.P.S. Yes, this blog post was originally created on iPad.