Ride the Lightning

Yikes! Cellebrite Reportedly Can Unlock Every iPhone Model

March 1, 2018

SC Media carried a story on February 27^th reporting that Israel-based Cellebrite has privately announced the capability to defeat the security of iOS 11 enabled devices including the latest iPhone, iPad, iPad mini, iPad Pro and iPod touch.

Anonymous sources told Forbes that in the last few months the company has developed undisclosed techniques to get into iOS 11 and is advertising them to law enforcement and private forensics firms globally.

A separate source in the police forensics community told the publication Cellebrite told him the company could unlock an iPhone 8 and that he believed the same was possible for the most recent iPhone X.

Apple had a pretty weak response to the claims which you may find here. Apple is urging customers to upgrade to the latest version of iOS 11, which has the latest protections (whatever that means).

Rod Soto, director of security research at JASK, told SC Media that history has taught us that keeping zero days in the name of security or for law enforcement is dangerous.

"In addition to this potentially impacting civil rights and due process, it also relies heavily on the ability of Cellebrite (and similar firms) to keep the code out of the hands of malicious actors," Soto said. "It's difficult to do this, as evidenced by the leaks of NSA exploitation code."

As we all know, once such capabilities are in the hands of the bad guys, they will rapidly use them for their own gain. A scary story – and I see I must change yet another slide in my upcoming cybersecurity presentations . . . I wish these developments wouldn't come with such blinding speed!

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