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Now that the FBI has unlocked an iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino shooters, it appears there is no shortage of law enforcement demand for the new-found technology.
A prosecutor in Arkansas said this week the Federal Bureau of Investigation had agreed to help open an iPhone and iPod in a murder case, and prosecutors and police across the country noted a sizable backlog of iPhones tied to criminal investigations, including hundreds in jurisdictions in Los Angeles and New York.
Still, what kind of help the federal agency could offer those local departments remained unclear Friday, and at least one Utah digital forensic expert was skeptical of a widespread intrusion into the privacy of iPhone users.
“This isn’t a widespread scope of the FBI is now going to have access to everyone’s computer,” said Trent Leavitt, co-founder of Orem-based Decipher Forensics.
Federal agents, Leavitt noted, would have to have an iPhone in hand to unlock its secrets, and he pointed to reports that the method used in the San Bernardino case only worked for an iPhone 5C using a version of the iOS 9 operating system.
Leavitt, however, was not surprised that the FBI may try to use the technology beyond the initial case.
“To say, ‘we’re only going to use it on the San Bernardino case,’ I think, is a ridiculous statement to believe,” he said. “If there’s evidence and people to be brought to justice through digital evidence, which is very common today, then in my opinion of course the FBI is going to use that tool or methodology or procedure to solve other cases.”
As it is, Leavitt said cracking into any iPhone 4S or above is difficult without a passcode, and can be extremely expensive when it is possible.
Leavitt said technology previously existed to open an iPhone with the iOS 8 operating system, but the cost was $10,000 to $12,000 to unlock an individual device.
Simply trying to guess the passcode of a locked iPhone could disable it, and may lead to any valuable data on the device being wiped, he said.
“After 10 attempts, the phone ‘bricks,’ and by ‘brick’ meaning you’re not getting back into the phone — nobody’s getting into it,” Leavitt said.
Leavitt said an iPhone 5C currently resided at his lab, with a customer insisting on waiting until there was an "affordable" method to unlock it.
The digital forensic tech said there were other ways to try to tap into a later model iPhone’s contents if the device had been backed up locally on a personal computer, or when it had been backed up via the iCloud if the username and password were known.
Leavitt said, though, many iPhone users simply do not back up their phones regularly, if at all.
Unified Police Department detective Nick Renfro said challenges in unlocking electronic devices was not an issue singularly related to one smartphone maker in the age of encryption.
“It’s always going to be unique to the phone and unique to the user as far as our ability to access those things,” he said. “Each phone has its own unique characteristics that we have to go through, investigate, hopefully to try to find out things that we can find.”
Renfro also noted the care taken in employing a variety of digital forensic methods to uncover evidence in criminal cases.
“We’re going to always make sure that it’s a legal search and that we’re operating within the Constitution on those things,” Renfro said.
