Delhi Police Can Hack Your Smartphone To Extract Data Even If It's Locked

If you think locking your smartphone is enough to prevent a person from extracting data from it, you should know this. Delhi Police is a law enforcement agency in India that can access data on smartphones using their special tools, according to a report, though the tools may not succeed all the time.

Medinama reported that Delhi Police can gain access to smartphones, including iPhones. The report added that the law enforcement agencies in India don’t do as well as American law enforcement agencies when it comes to breaking into smartphones protected with security procedures. The tools American agencies use are much more effective than those used by Indian agencies.

According to the report, the Delhi Police rely on tools supplied by Israeli firm Cellebrite like UFED along with Physical Analyzer by Celebrate that FTI also used to conclude that the iPhone X of Amazon CEO was hacked by Saudi Arabian Prince.

The Delhi Police also use the XRY set of tools from MicroSystemation AB (MSAB), Detective from Oxygen Forensics, and MOBILedit from Compelson Labs. These tools are mainly used for extracting data from locked mobile devices but the success rate is not constant.

In his comment, deputy commissioner Anyesh Roy of the Delhi Police said:

“All the forensic tools through which data can be extracted, they are available. The data is only extracted when the investigation demands it. The data extraction process is also specified on the basis of how much data the investigation officer demands and how much data can be extracted using the tools.”

The tools are placed in the National Cyber Forensic Laboratory, located in New Delhi.

It seems much harder to access data on an iPhone than on an Android smartphone because of the policies and security measures Apple applies. In the past, Apple was once ordered to create a back door to let the FBI access the iPhone of a suspect. It was protected with a 4-digit password that the FBI failed to crack. However, the company’s CEO refused the order due to the potential danger posed to other users.

Nevertheless, data extracting tools like Cellebrite can break into locked iPhones even without Apple’s help. Shortly after the announcement of iOS 14, the company tweeted about the support for data extraction in this operating system. It said in a blog post:

“To help investigators breakdown the message silos and gain a unified view of the communication regardless of the channel used (SMS, MMS or iMessage), version 7.38 presents the communications within Chats, under a single, unified conversation view.”

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