“It uses some very advanced approach using hardware vulnerabilities,” he hypothesized. Vladimir Katalov, founder of Russian forensics company ElcomSoft, said he believed GrayKey was the tool in use in the New York case. When Forbes obtained a leaked recording of Grayshift CEO David Miles talking in mid-2019, he said that his company’s tech could get “almost everything” on an iPhone in AFU mode. The agency has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on acquiring the devices, which start in price from $9,995. GrayKey, a tool created by Atlanta-based startup Grayshift, has been an increasingly popular choice for the FBI. The question remains: What is that tool? It’s likely to be one of two popular iPhone forensics tools used by the FBI: the GrayKey or the Cellebrite UFED.

What is apparent is that the government has a tool that can bypass encryption to get into what most people would assume are private messages. Cellebriteįorensic exploitation of devices affects any encrypted communications app, from WhatsApp to Wickr, not just Signal.

The Justice Department said it couldn’t comment. “Keeping devices up-to-date and choosing a strong lock screen passcode can help protect information if a device is lost or stolen.”Ĭounsel for the defendant in the New York case didn’t respond to messages. Any hackers or hacking devices with the right iPhone vulnerabilities could then piece together keys and start unlocking private data inside the device. An iPhone in this state is more susceptible to having data inside extracted because encryption keys are stored in memory. There’s also some metadata in the screenshots, which indicates not only that Signal had been decrypted on the phone, but that the extraction was done in “partial AFU.” That latter acronym stands for “after first unlock” and describes an iPhone in a certain state: an iPhone that is locked but that has been unlocked once and not turned off. In the Signal chats obtained from one of their phones, they discuss not just weapons trades but attempted murder too, according to documents filed by the Justice Department. (The suspects have not yet entered a plea and remain innocent until proven guilty). The clues came via Seamus Hughes at the Program on Extremism at the George Washington University in court documents containing screenshots of Signal messages between men accused, in 2020, of running a gun trafficking operation in New York.

Signal security