Cracked My First Phone Today!

A few months ago I got brought on as a Mobile Forensic Investigator. Agency has provided me all of my training, which I completed last week. A Detective brought me a phone that they were able to do a physical extraction on, but lacked the password to get into the phone and enable the options needed to do a logical extraction. Took me a few days, but happy to report I was successful in obtaining the password. I have done a number of phone extractions thus far, but this was the first where the phone was locked and were unable to get in.

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MitM

congrats on making it happen. Cool stuff

NetworkNewb

So how did you end up getting the password to the phone?

the_Grinch

If I told you, I'd have to kill you.

It was a combo of things, but the important piece was to get a copy of the device_policies.xml. This file will actually tell you the length of the password, how many uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numeric characters and nonnumeric characters. From there I was able to look at some information in the extraction to discern a possible password. I had the hash and salt values so I placed them into another program with a wordlist and bam got the password.

I was utilizing hashcat, but without knowing the length I had to go through each length (with this device 15 characters is the max). With a four and six character length password (utilizing a GPU) it took 48 hours to run through every iteration. With a length of eight characters I was looking at 3 months to go through every iteration. Since I obtained the password I forwarded to a 10 character password length and with one GPU it would take 3 years and 61 days to crack.

Made for a very late night because once I get into something letting it go tends to be an issue.

dhay13

Was this an iphone? IIRC the FBI paid something like $1.5 million to the San Bernardino shooters iphone.

Great job!

the_Grinch

Thanks! Sadly was not an iPhone, though based on a solicitation I received to crack the phone it would have cost $10 to $15k.

JoJoCal19

Awesome to hear! Was it stuff from the XRY course that enabled you to do that?

jamesleecoleman

Good job!!! High five!!!!!!!!

When I read the file, I thought you dropped your phone a broke it lol.

NavyMooseCCNA

I was going to post something snarky, but after reading this all I can say is Bravo Zulu!!

gale_

NavyMooseCCNA wrote: »

I was going to post something snarky, but after reading this all I can say is Bravo Zulu!!

Haha. I thought he broke his iPhone screen.

JasminLandry

Wow, that sounds pretty awesome, good work!

the_Grinch

JoJoCal19 wrote: »

Awesome to hear! Was it stuff from the XRY course that enabled you to do that?

The XRY training I received definitely helped me! Without the physical extraction and analysis training I received I wouldn't have been able to collect the information I needed. Also, from the final course on JTAG and Chip Off I wouldn't have known ahead of time where to obtain the hash and salt values. Hindsight being 20/20 as I was doing research that information is available on the web (for getting the sha and salt), but nice to have done it on a test phone before performing the work on a device possibly containing evidence.

PJ_Sneakers

Nice!! Out of curiosity, why did you need to do a logical when you already pulled a physical extraction? Not questioning your 1337 hax0rng sklz, just curious.