"Every week a new phone comes out […] and we have to reverse engineer them"

Mar 28, 2012 12:23 GMT  ·  By

Micro Systemation, a Stockholm, Sweden-based firm that sells law enforcement hacking tools, has published a video in which it demonstrates how easy it is to crack an iPhone’s four-digit passcode.

Micro Systemation makes it its business to find holes in iOS and Android software so that law enforcement and the military can access the devices of criminal suspects or military detainees, according to Forbes.

In the video embedded below, an application called XRY is used to quickly crack an iOS passcode, dump its data onto a computer, decrypt it, and ultimately display the user’s information.

This includes GPS location, various files, call logs, contacts, messages, and even a log of the actual key strokes used to type in data.

The company’s marketing director, Mike Dickinson, said his company sells products capable of accessing passcode-protected devices in over 60 territories around the globe. They reportedly use the same types of exploits that jailbreakers do.

“It’s a massive boom industry, the growth in evidence from mobile phones,” says Dickinson. “After twenty years or so, people understand they shouldn’t do naughty things on their personal computers, but they still don’t understand that about phones. From an evidential point of view, it’s of tremendous value.”

“If they’ve done something wrong,” he adds.

“Every week a new phone comes out with a different operating sytems and we have to reverse engineer them,” he says. “We’re constantly chasing the market.”

Dicksinson admitted that even his advanced software would have trouble craving a passcode that goes beyond the traditional four characters. The longer the passcode, the harder to crack, he says:

“The more complex the password, the longer and harder it’s going to be to access the phone,” he says. “In some cases, it takes so long to brute force that it’s not worth doing it.