Elcomsoft's blog covers password recovery, encryption weaknesses and mobile forensics, including iOS, password managers and disk encryption.
HN links it for security research on Nikon image authentication, Synology encryption and password manager brute-forcing, though one commenter says a headline overstated a possible flaw.
Apple is known to hand off whole China iCloud to CCP.
Also they refuse to zero-knowledge (e2e) encrypt US iCloud backups[1].
In San Bernandino shooter’s case, they refused FBI’s request to develop new tools to hack an already locked iPhone.
However I have little doubt they will refuse to sign&push OTA update of a Signal.app or “improved” iOS developed and provided by NSA.
Mercenary who helped Carlos Ghosn, recalled that in the middle of operation, while riding a train, his iPhone suddenly rebooted and started an iOS update[2]:
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On the train, Taylor’s phone began an unexpected automatic software update. “The first thing I thought was, I wonder if the NSA knows,” he recalls. “I wouldn’t put anything past them.”
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[1] - https://blog.elcomsoft.com/2021/01/apple-scraps-end-to-end-encryption-of-icloud-backups/
[2] - https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/07/how-carlos-ghosn-escaped-japan
This appears to be a cross-platform version of h2testw, which is widely recommended for finding the true capacity of a storage device. Another common recommendation is ChipGenius and the various manufacturer-specific tools, which can read the real ID of the NAND ICs, that AFAIK is beyond the ability of nearly all the fakers to change:
https://blog.elcomsoft.com/2019/01/identifying-ssd-controller-and-nand-configuration/
From the research I've done (mainly related to data recovery), the NAND flash industry seems extremely secretive and shady in many ways --- from the near-zero availability of public datasheets, to the many rebrands/"reclaimed"/recycled part sources, to what they're doing to SLC and higher-reliability technologies. There are also ways to determine how worn-out a NAND IC is, but even those may be reversible with the right physical treatments.
Just because something is different from something that doesn't work doesn't mean the different thing will work: most things don't work.
I'm not seeing anything in your description that couldn't also be said about using PKI to allow people to sign stuff they published. (And better: it's not broken by non-deceptive edits, like cropping or brightness adjustments)-- except that PKI already exists so we can't imagine that it would magically solve these problems. :) (and there is a long long history of people thinking varrious PKI ideas will magically solve varrious problems and then failing to solve them at all)
(I mean cameras that produced 'signed' output is also a thing that has previously existed too: https://blog.elcomsoft.com/2011/04/nikon-image-authentication-system-compromised/ and was never particularly popular even with the target market)
Did you read the article?
The article says there might be a flaw, and it would be a huge deal. It does not state those phones are broken. It does not extract keys, which would be needed in the case of Sony cameras to sign fake pictures.
Here's a later followup article from Elcomsoft, one of the best security firms around [1]. The key quote: "checkm8 does not affect the Secure Enclave."
So no, they did not extract keys needed that would be needed to sign new phots for the Sony phone.
And later iPhones have removed this as a vector. It's unlikely Sony made the same mistakes quite old iPhones did, since they have the ability to learn from past security issues.
[1] https://blog.elcomsoft.com/2021/05/checkm8-based-extraction-of-iphone-5s-6-6s-and-se/
Most defiantly. iOS is a different kettle of fish.
Same challenges are present with performing forensics on an iPhone! The top commercial forensic toolkits will try to jailbreak the handset if possible to pull off artifacts. Good luck on newer hardware with the latest iOS versions. [1]
On the topic of iOS forensics, you can still get quite many useful artifacts from iOS backups with Mobile Verification Toolkit [2] being quite exceptional. I have had less success with iOS backups and the popular iLEAPP forensics software [3].
[1] https://blog.elcomsoft.com/2022/09/ios-forensic-toolkit-8-0-now-official-bootloader-level-extraction-for-76-devices/
[2] https://docs.mvt.re/en/latest/
[3] https://github.com/abrignoni/iLEAPP
> you mean something like ios keychain? what does this do that can't be achieved using disk encryption + sandbox?
Because once the phone is booted and unlocked by the user there is no further protection. Do you keep your phone turned off?
Also the lack of device pairing means it is usually easy to dump the encrypted image and crack the pass code quite quickly.
https://blog.elcomsoft.com/2017/10/ios-vs-android-physical-data-extraction-and-data-protection-compared/
> firefox for android
I find it quite slow, slower than chrome downloading all the ads. But it is an option I guess. It won't get wider uptake though, the default platform browser is the main game.