The indictment against Eric Adams was unsealed on September 26, 2024, revealing charges of bribery and campaign finance violations. This unsealing made public details about Adams’ actions, including his decision to change his phone passcode from 4 digits to 6 digits on November 5, 2024, the day before the FBI executed a search warrant on his devices.
Why A Change From Four To Six Digits Is A Big Deal
This seemingly minor change dramatically increased the complexity of unlocking his device, adding significant difficulty for forensic tools like Cellebrite and Graykey, which rely on brute-force attacks to crack passcodes.
Moving from ten thousand possible combinations (with a 4-digit passcode) to one million combinations (with a 6-digit passcode) substantially extends the time required for forensic investigators to break into a phone.
The challenge is further compounded by modern smartphone security features, such as delays between passcode attempts and Apple’s Secure Enclave, which isolates encryption keys.
Apple’s Secure Enclave is a special chip in devices like iPhones that protects sensitive information, such as your passcode or Face ID data. It works by securely storing encryption keys and making it much harder for anyone to hack into your phone. If someone tries to guess your passcode too many times, the Secure Enclave will slow down the attempts and can even erase the data on the phone after too many wrong guesses.
It Is Only A Matter Of Time And Technology
While it is unclear from the indictment if investigators have been able to unlock Adams’ phone without the passcode as of this writing, in all probability his actions only delay the inevitable.
Advances in cell phone forensic technology mean that while a phone may be locked and inaccessible today, it’s only a matter of time before it can be cracked. When authorities, like the government, have a phone in their possession, it’s essentially in stasis—a perfect, unchanging snapshot in time.
The phone doesn’t receive software updates or patches because it’s out of the user’s hands, meaning any vulnerabilities present when it was seized remain intact. This is crucial because forensic technology keeps advancing, and new methods or tools for breaking into phones are constantly being developed.
Even though current tools like Cellebrite or Graykey might not be able to unlock the phone right now due to its security, the phone’s frozen state means that, as technology progresses, new techniques almost certainly will eventually break through.
Because the phone’s security isn’t evolving or being updated, it’s only a matter of time until future forensic tools are sophisticated enough to crack it. Essentially, the phone remains locked in time, but technology keeps moving forward, steadily increasing the chances of unlocking it.
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