Changes to the way that Apple protects encrypted iOS backups leave devices more vulnerable to certain types of attack, says ElcomSoft, a Russian company used by law enforcement agencies and others to access iPhones. However, it only applies if the attacker has physical access to the device and can crack the passcode.
The changes were deliberately introduced as part of iOS 11 …
Anyone wanting to access private data from an iPhone used to face two challenges, says the company in a blog post (which was experiencing loading problems at the time of writing). First, they had to access the device itself, which usually requires knowing or cracking the passcode. Second, even with the passcode, you could not access all the data on the device unless you could also crack the password used for the encrypted backup of the device.
