This article reports that Cellebrite Premium couldn’t bruteforce a Samsung A30 after trying nearly 10 millions combinations.
Hence that device is clearly not a flagship but a mid-range phone, furthermore hosts an exynos old chipset and has probably not been updated for a few years.
Also 10 million really look like a low number, speculating the password rate guessing per second is not that high.
Perhaps another page in the chapter of what cellebrite claims to do and what cellebrite is really able to.
Here’s a translated portion of the article that caught my eye.
In an expert report, the Federal Police reported that the cell phone was subjected to a password cracking process with Cellebrite Premium software, used by the corporation to access data from devices protected by blocking patterns. The tool generated a “dictionary” based on Marchesini’s biographical information. Words and numbers were combined to generate possible passwords, without success.
If you get any lesson from this, make sure your passwords don’t have any relation to your life whatsoever. More random, the more likely it can beat similar “dictionary” attacks.
My question is…what exactly is in Cellebrite Premium? Could it be just that Cellebrite relies less on zero-days more than we thought? Or is the Brazilian police to incompetent to use it properly?
The fact that they only tried 10 million combinations strikes me as odd but besides that celebrities brute force capabilities are irrelevant if the device was in BFU with a sufficiently high entropy passcode. This is true regardless of the device model.
It’s actually pretty interesting to hear about real world use of targeted dictionary attacks. I suspect they wouldn’t be using these methods if they weren’t highly effective.