Elcomsoft Phone Password Breaker and Elcomsoft iOS Forensic Toolkit have been around for a while, acquiring user information from physical iPhone/iPad devices or recovering data from user-created offline backups. Both tools required the investigator to have access to the device itself, or at least accessing a PC with which the iOS device was synced at least once. This limited the tools’ applications to solving the already committed crime, but did little to prevent crime that’s just being planned.

The new addition to the family of iOS acquisition tools turns things upside down. Meet updated Elcomsoft Phone Password Breaker – a tool that can now retrieve information from suspects’ phones without them even noticing. The newly introduced attack does not need investigators to have access to the phone itself. It doesn’t even require access to offline backups produced by that phone. Instead, the new attack targets an online, remote storage provided by Apple. By attacking a remote storage, the updated tool makes it possible watching suspects’ iPhone activities with little delay and without alerting the suspects. In fact, the tool can retrieve information from the online storage without iPhone users even knowing, or having a chance to learn about the unusual activity on their account.

How It Works

First and foremost, there’s no magic. We still need the user’s original Apple ID and password to access their iCloud information. If Apple ID and password are not known or no longer valid (e.g. user changed the password), Phone Password Breaker will be unable to retrieve information from iCloud.

In order to understand how the whole thing works, let’s look how iPhone backups work.

When it comes to backing up their devices, iPhone users have choices. The backup can be stored locally on their PC. It can also be uploaded into a dedicated cloud storage managed by Apple Inc. Apple introduced iCloud in June, 2011. The new service allows iOS users backing up the content of their devices to a remote location. By doing that, the users get an additional benefit of being able to share their files between multiple iOS devices  such as an iPhone and an iPad. Using iCloud is as simple as selecting a check box when setting up an iOS device, which is the reason an estimated 125 million Apple customers are using iCloud as of April 2012.

iCloud backups hold essentially the same information as stored in offline backups, which includes accounts and passwords , call logs and text messages, calendars, appointments, contacts and organizer information . Pictures and Web browsing history including URLs of recently visited sites are also included.

When configured to use the iCloud service, iPhones automatically connect to iCloud network and backup their content every time a docked device gets within the reach of a Wi-Fi access point. iCloud backups are incremental, which means that the uploading may take a while during the first backup, but will work blazing fast for each subsequent backup. This is to say, iCloud backups represent a fresh, near real-time copy of information stored in iPhone devices, including information about recently made and received calls, sent and received text and email messages. This is the type of information that can be used to monitor and prevent criminal activities, and exactly the reason that data can be essential for investigators and other forensic customers.

ElcomSoft researchers analyzed the communication protocol connecting iPhone users with Apple iCloud, and were able to emulate the correct commands in order to retrieve the content of iOS users’ iCloud storage. It’s important to note that, unlike offline backups that may come encrypted and must be broken into (a time-consuming operation), data retrieved from iCloud is received in plain, unencrypted form . The 5GB  of storage space can be retrieved in reasonable time, while receiving incremental updates is even faster. The ability to retrieve iCloud backups is now part of Elcomsoft Phone Password Breaker. Existing customers are welcome to upgrade.

Read the official press-release on ElcomSoft breaking into Apple iCloud backups.

Sign up for EPPB webinar! http://www.elcomsoft.com/webinars.html

In this one-hour webinar scheduled for June we will demonstrate EPPB in action and answer all your questions online.

Here’s the wrap-up of new features.

Ability to Decrypt Files from BlackBerry SD Card

EPPB can now decrypt .rem files from BlackBerry SD cards. Depending on media card encryption settings you may be asked to provide BB device password, BB dump (chip-off or physical), or both:

• For SD cards encrypted using “Device key” option a device dump will be required;
• For SD cards encrypted using “Device password” option a device password will be required (don’t forget that you can recover device password for SD cards utilizing this type of encryption using Professional Edition of EPPB);
• For SD cards encrypted using “Device key and device password” both dump and password will be required.

Decryption process is fast and simple:

1. Choose File – BlackBerry – Decrypt SD card
2. Select directory which is the root of SD card you’re trying to decrypt
3. Provide device dump and/or device password when requested
4. Select files to decrypt
5. Choose output directory
6. Watch files being decrypted

Improved iOS Keychain Explorer

EPPB can now display contents of iOS keychain even from backups that are not password-protected (not encrypted). This, however, will require you to provide so-called securityd key (also known as key 0×835 or key 2101) of the device used to produce the backup. You can acquire this key from the device by using our iOS Forensic Toolkit or by using other tools. As soon as you’ve got the key, open Keychain Explorer in EPPB (File – Apple – Keychain Explorer) and select your unencrypted backup. You will be then prompted for a device key — you can enter it in either hex or base64-encoded form. Once you provide the key, EPPB will display the keychain contents.

Users of iOS Forensic Toolkit can easily find this securityd key in a file that is produced during “GET KEYS” step (keys.plist): open file using any text editor (or property list editor if you’re on Mac) and locate a value corresponding to key “2101” in “DerivedKeys” section. Typically this would be the first value in a file, located on or around line 9.

You may be asking why bother with decrypting keychain if we already have a device and iOS Forensic Toolkit can perform its physical acquisition? Well, keychain from the backup may contain information that has been already wiped from the device (i.e. if user has performed wipe or restore on the device). The great thing about securityd key is that it is constant for the lifetime of the device, meaning having this key will allow you to decrypt all past, current, and future iOS keychains from the (unencrypted) backups.

Support for UFED Keyfiles for Decryption of iOS User Partitions

Last but not least, we have updated EPPB to accept UFED keyfiles (.UFD) and decrypt iOS user partition images, so you can now decrypt image and load/analyze it outside of UFED environment.

Updated version of EPPB (version 1.83) is now available as a beta version (you can download a full MSI installer here, or just an updated .exe file here). If new features sound like something you need — please, give it a try. As always, we’d love to hear back from you, and the easiest way to reach us is to use Help – Send feedback menu in the EPPB — this will create an email that will land right in my inbox.

As a final note, I would like to thank our customers. Those new features were added based on your feedback/requests/suggestions, and we really hope they will make your job easier. Thanks for choosing us!

We’re working hard on improving the product and adding new valuable features to it, and I’m sure you won’t be disappointed with what is coming next!

Criminal investigators, police officers and workers of the intelligence are not as lucky. They have dozens of iPhones to process every day, hundreds every week. “When I get an iPhone, I only have two hours”, says a police officer who’s name we cannot disclose. “In 120 minutes, I have to acquire and process information from that phone. Honestly, I can rarely complete it in a proper way.”

Here at ElcomSoft, we’re trying to do everything to make the life of investigators easier. Performing a physical acquisition with EIFT, which is the only proper way to capture everything in the phone, only takes 20 to 40 minutes depending on the model. But here comes another pitfall. Unlike pickpockets and fraudsters with long, thin fingers, police officers have big hands and firm, strong fingers. Performing the Apple Dance is extremely frustrating and almost physically painful. “I have to try and try before I can twist my fingers to hold those damn buttons”, confesses another police officer. “These damn things are too small and slick”.

Visiting the EuroForensics conference a few days ago, I was demonstrating how easy it was to switch an iPhone into DFU mode. I did it right the first time, but on a second try I failed miserably. “I’m too old for this shtuff”, commented yet another visitor whose badge simply read “Special Agent”.

I passed my concerns to ElcomSoft R&D department, and they built a mockup of an ingenious device automating this sort of things. They called it “iOS DFU Mode Starter”. As a first mockup, it’s not yet perfect. It requires careful placement of the device, and you have to plug a USB cable by hand. Other than that, iOS DFU Mode Starter can switch the device into Debug Firmware Update mode with 100% reliability. “It’s almost infallible”, says Andrey Belenko, ElcomSoft leading researcher. “And it was incredible fun to build”.

Here’s a video demonstrating how the new device works:

Why LEGO?

I was shocked at first when I saw the robot. A LEGO? Are you guys kidding me? It turned out our R&D guys were serious as ever. Here’s what Andrey Belenko has to say about this robot.

“Constructing mockups and early prototypes with LEGO bricks is commonplace for building robots. Honestly, LEGO blocks are a godsend to all robot builders. Don’t be fooled with the look of the thing; these bricks are a serious prototyping tool.”

“LEGO bricks hold together amazingly well under low and medium load. LEGO blocks come in a wide assortment of shapes and sizes. They give a tight fit, they are reusable, and they save us a lot of time when prototyping. We’re not building an industrial piece; this robot simply handles a modern electronic device. No force is required.”

Whether or not this device goes into production, and what the price is going to be like if it does is yet to be determined.

The newly updated Elcomsoft iOS Forensic Toolkit now supports iOS 5.1 and adds a number of small and not-so-small enhancements to the already sound package. The ability to try top 100 most common passcodes gives a chance to recover a passcode in a matter of minutes. There’s one more thing new with the updated iOS Forensic Toolkit: an iPhone booted with iOS Forensic Toolkit now displays a small ElcomSoft logo instead of the default one.

Top 100 Passcodes

We’ve seen lots of iPhones. Most are locked with simple, easy to remember passcodes. We were able to compile a list of most commonly used passcodes. There are the obvious ones like 1111, 2222, 1234, 5555, vertical raw 2580, and there are many ‘convenience’ passcodes that are just easier to remember or enter on the iPhone’s screen. There’s a whole range of passcodes representing possible dates significant to iPhone owners; these passcodes range from early 1930 to 2020. The updated iOS Forensic Toolkit will now try these passcodes before launching a brute-force attack.

How good are the chances? A recent study demonstrated that as many as 15% of all passcode sets are represented by only 10 different passcodes (out of 10,000 possible combinations). That’s 1 in 7 iPhones unlocked within minutes or even seconds.

New Logo

iPhones booted by iOS Forensic Toolkit will now display ElcomSoft logo when loading. Not a big deal, but a nice and pleasant for us visual effect

We also added a few other improvements and enhancements here and there, making the new version a recommended update.

Elcomsoft Wireless Security Auditor is one tool to test how strong the company’s Wi-Fi passwords are. After checking the obvious vulnerabilities such as open wireless access points and the use of obsolete WEP encryption, system administrators  will use Wireless Security Auditor that tries to ‘guess’ passwords protecting the company’s wireless traffic. In previous versions, the guessing was limited to certain dictionary attacks with permutations. The new version gets smarter, employing most of the same guessing techniques that are likely to be used by an intruder.

Humans are the weakest link in wireless security. Selecting a weak, easy to guess password easily overcomes all the benefits provided by extensive security measures implemented in WPA/WPA2 protection. In many companies, employees are likely to choose simple, easy to remember passwords, thus compromising their entire corporate network.

The New Attacks
The new attacks help Elcomsoft Wireless Security Auditor recover weak passwords, revealing existing weaknesses and vulnerabilities in companies’ wireless network infrastructure.

Word Attack
If it’s known that a password consists of a certain word, the Word attack will attempt to recover that password by trying heavily modified versions of that word. This attack only has two options: you can set the source word and you can disable all permutations except changing the letter case. In addition, we can apply permutations to the source word first, forming a small dictionary; then perform a full dictionary attack, applying various permutations to all words from the newly formed list.

Mask Attack
Certain passwords or password ranges may be known. The mask attack allows creating a flexible mask, brute-forcing the resulting limited combination of passwords very quickly. The masks can be very flexible. One can specify placeholders for static characters, letter case, as well as full or limited range of special characters, digits or letters. Think of the Mask attack as an easy (and very flexible) way to check all obvious passwords from Password000 to Password999.

Combination Attack
You have two dictionaries. We combine each word from one dictionary with every word from another. By default, the words are combined as is, but you can increase the number of possible combinations by allowing delimiters (such as space, underscore and other signs), checking upper/lower case combinations or using extra mutations.

Hybrid Attack
This is one of the more interesting attacks out there. In a sense, Hybrid attacks come very close to how real human intruders think. The Hybrid attacks integrates ElcomSoft’s experience in dealing with password recovery. We’ve seen many (think thousands) weak passwords, and were able to generalize ways people are making them. Dates, names, dictionary words, phrases and simple character substitutions are the most common things folks do to make their passwords ‘hard to guess’. The new Hybrid attack will handle the ‘hard’ part.

Technically, the Hybrid attack uses one or more dictionaries with common words, and one or more .rul files specifying mutation rules. We’re supplying a few files with the most commonly used mutation rules:

Common.rul – integrates the most commonly used mutations. In a word, we’ve seen those types of passwords a lot, so we were able to generalize and derive these rules.
Dates.rul – pretty much what it says. Combines dictionary words with dates in various formats. This is a pretty common way to construct weak passwords.
L33t.rul – the “leet” lingo. Uses various combinations of ASCII characters to replace Latin letters. C001 hackers make super-strong passwords with these… It takes minutes to try them all.
Numbers.rul – mixes dictionary words with various number combinations.

ElcomSoft has recently announced the switch to OpenCL, an open cross-platform architecture offering universal, future-proof accessibility to a wide range of acceleration hardware. We’re actively using GPU acceleration for breaking passwords faster. No issues with NVIDIA hardware, but working with AMD devices has always been a trouble.

So we jumped in, embedding OpenCL support into Elcomsoft Phone Password Breaker and Wireless Security Auditor. As an immediate benefit, we were able to add long-awaited support for AMD’s latest generation of graphic accelerators, the AMD Radeon™ HD 7000 Series currently including AMD Radeon™ HD 7750, 7770, 7950, and 7970 models. Headache-free support for future generations of acceleration hardware is icing on the cake.

After switching to OpenCL, we further optimized acceleration code for AMD hardware, squeezing up to 50% more speed out of the same boards. This isn’t something to sniff at, as even a few per cents of performance can save hours when breaking long, complex passwords.

OpenCL vs. CUDA

AMD goes OpenCL. What about NVIDIA? Technically, we could have handled NVIDIA accelerators the same way, via OpenCL (it’s a cross-platform architecture, remember?) In that case, we would be getting a simpler, easier to maintain product line with a single acceleration technology to support.

However, we’re not making a full commitment just yet. While some of us love open-source, publicly maintained cross-platform solutions, these are not always the best thing to do in commercial apps. And for a moment here, we’re not talking about licensing issues. Instead, we’re talking sheer speed. While OpenCL is a great platform, offering future-proof, headache-free support of future acceleration hardware, it’s still an extra abstraction layer sitting between the hardware and our code. It’s great when we’re talking AMD, a company known for a rather inconsistent developer support for its latest hardware; there’s simply no alternative. If we wanted access to their latest state-of-the-art graphic accelerators such as AMD Radeon™ HD 7000 Series boards, it was OpenCL or nothing.

We didn’t have such issues with AMD’s main competitor, NVIDIA. NVIDIA was the first player on this arena, being the first to release graphical accelerators capable of fixed-point calculations. It was also the first to offer non-gaming developers access to sheer computational power of its GPU units by releasing CUDA, an application programming interface enabling developers use its hardware in non-graphical applications. From the very beginning and up to this day, CUDA maintains universal compatibility among the many generations of NVIDIA graphical accelerators. The same simply that can’t be said about AMD.

So is it the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach? Partly, but that’s just one side of the coin. CUDA simply offers better performance than OpenCL. The speed benefit is slight, but it is there, and it’s significant enough to get noticed. We want to squeeze every last bit of performance out of our products and computers’ hardware, and that’s the real reason we’ll be staying with CUDA for as long as it’s supported – or until OpenCL offers performance that can match that of CUDA.

Did we make the switch half-heartedly? Nope. We’re enthusiastic about the future of OpenCL, looking forward to run our software on new acceleration platforms. But we don’t want to abandon our heritage code – especially if it performs better than its replacement!

Less than 50% of all respondents come from Computer Law, Educational, Financial, Forensics, Government, Military and Scientific organizations. The larger half of respondents comes from ‘Other’ type of organizations.

Less than 30% of respondents indicated they have never forgotten a password. Most frequently quoted reasons for losing a password to a resource would be infrequent use of a resource (28%), not writing it down (16%), returning from a vacation (13%).

Only about 25% of all respondents indicated they change their passwords regularly. The rest will either change their passwords infrequently (24%), sporadically or almost never.

The quiz revealed a serious issue with how most respondents handle default passwords (passwords that are automatically generated or assigned to their accounts by system administrators). Only 28% of respondents would always change the default password, while more than 50% would usually keep the assigned one. In ElcomSoft’s view, this information should really raise an alert with IT security staff and call for a password security audit. ElcomSoft offers a relevant tool, Proactive Password Auditor, allowing organizations performing an audit of their network account passwords.

Unsurprisingly for a sample with given background, most respondents weren’t happy about their organizations’ security policies, being in either full or partial disagreement with their employer’s current policy (61%). 76% of all respondents indicated they wanted a stricter security policy, while 24% would want a looser one. The surprising part is discovered in the next chart: of those who are fully content with their employers’ security policies, only 11% would leave it as it is, 20% would vote for a looser policy, and 69% would rather have a stricter security policy.

The complete results and charts are available at http://www.elcomsoft.com/PR/quiz-charts.pdf

Apple iWork, an inexpensive office productivity suite for the Mac and iOS platforms, has been around since 2005 and 2011 respectively. The iWork suite consists of three apps: Numbers, Pages, and Keynotes, and gained quite some popularity among Apple followers. Yet, for all this time, no one came out with a feasible password recovery solution for the iWork document format.

The reason for the lack of a password recovery solution for the iWork format is extremely slow recovery speed. This owes to Apple’s implementation of encryption: the company used an industry-standard AES algorithm with strong, 128-bit keys. Brute-forcing a 128-bit number on today’s hardware remains impossible. The original, plain-text password has to be recovered in order to decrypt protected iWork documents.

However, recovering that plain-text password is also very slow. Apple used the PBKDF2 algorithm to derive an encryption key from plain-text passwords, with some 4000 iterations of a hash function (SHA1). While it takes only a hundredth of a second to verify a single password, an attack would be speed-limited to about 500 passwords per second on today’s top hardware. This is extremely slow considering the number of possible password combinations.

Distributed Attacks

When starting considering the addition of Apple iWork to the list of supported products, we quickly recognized the speed bottleneck. With as slow a recovery, a distributed attack on the password would be the only feasible one. Indeed, using multiple computers connected to a large cluster gives us more speed, breaking the barrier of unreasonable and promising realistic recovery timeframe. Brute-forcing is still not a good option, but ElcomSoft’s advanced dictionary attack with customizable masks and configurable permutations is very feasible if we consider one thing: the human factor.

The Human Factor

Let’s look at the product one more time. Apple iWork is sold to mobile users for $9.99. Mac customers can purchase the suite for $79. These price points clearly suggest that Apple is targeting the consumer market, not government agencies and not corporations with established security policies enforcing the use of long, complex, strong passwords.

Multiple researches confirm it’s a given fact that most people, if not enforced by a security policy, will choose simple, easy to remember passwords such as ‘abc’, ‘password1’ or their dog’s name. In addition, it’s in the human nature to reduce the number of things to remember. Humans are likely to re-use their passwords, with little or no variation, in various places: their instant messenger accounts, Web and email accounts, social networks and other places from which a password can be easily retrieved.

Considering all this, 500 passwords per second doesn’t sound that bad anymore. Which brings us to the announcement: Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery now supports Apple iWork, becoming an industry-first tool and the only product so far to recover passwords for Numbers, Pages and Keynotes apps. It’s the human factor and advanced dictionary attacks that help it recover a significant share of iWork passwords in reasonable time.

Read the official press-release on Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery recovering Apple iWork passwords.