Brazil has been releasing details of a recent crime in which a child was murdered in his mother’s house for several weeks.
The country’s police have decided to use a tool so known as controversial, a program born in Israel that is capable of performing several tasks, mainly unlocking mobile phones, both iPhone and Android, although it can also recover deleted content.
It was thanks to that tool that they have obtained more evidence to find the murderer. At the moment, both the mother and her boyfriend are in prison, awaiting a judicial decision, but the evidence obtained by Cellebrite appears to have been essential in the arrest.
This tool is used mainly by law enforcement agencies as a way of unlocking a smartphone and recovering potential evidence in cases, in fact that is how they advertise it on their website, where the program cannot be downloaded for anyone to download. use, since they ask to fill out a form so that those responsible for the software can make a demonstration to the interested authorities.
In Brazil, the tool was used to help decrypt the iPhones belonging to two people suspected of murdering this 4-year-old boy, but that was possible because the laws in this country allow that kind of action, that invasion of privacy for the obtaining evidence.
But it is not the first time that the program has appeared in the press. Cellebrite became popular after the San Bernardino shooting in 2015, when the FBI used the Israeli tool to access suspects’ iPhones. At that time there was even a dispute between the FBI and Apple, as the agency wanted a back door to extract data from personal devices in cases like this. Apple never agreed with the idea of a back door, so the topic did not advance in that direction.
What can Cellebrite do
In this case, the tool has been used Cellebrite Premium, which served to brute force unlock the iPhones of the accused couple and obtain WhatsApp messages.
On its website, Cellebrite claims that the tool can unlock devices from iPhone 4s to iPhone XS, as well as iPod touch and iPad models running from iOS 5 to iOS 12.
Cellebrite also takes advantage of checkm8, a hardware exploit found in all Apple chips from A5 to A11 Bionic.
You can also unlock devices Android, of all ranges.
In addition to unlocking, it is capable of extract information from filesystem iPhone, or a physical extraction or extraction of the entire file system (File-Based Encryption) on many high-end Android devices. It allows access to data from third-party applications, WhatsApp conversations and other chats, downloaded emails and email attachments. Also recover deleted content, so nothing escapes him.
How much does Cellebrite cost
Cellebrite only sells its tool to government agencies and security researchers, and it costs up to $ 16,000.
