Elcomsoft Phone Breaker 6.61 Fixes iCloud Authentication Issue

Elcomsoft Phone Breaker 6.61 is a maintenance release that fixes the recent iCloud authentication issue when using cached credentials or authentication tokens. Since the beginning of June, Apple has once again altered lifespan of authentication tokens, making them short-lived for the purpose of accessing cloud backups. EPB 6.61 can now correctly identify the issue and prompt the user for re-authentication.

We updated Elcomsoft Phone Breaker to correctly identify and process the shortened lifespan of iCloud authentication tokens. Since the beginning of June, 2017, Apple has once again altered lifespan of iCloud authentication tokens. The unexpected token expiry led Elcomsoft Phone Breaker to fail when accessing iOS system backups without a valid error message. The new release correctly identifies the issue and prompts the user to either re-authenticate with Apple ID login and password or continue using existing authentication token for the purpose of accessing synchronized data and files in iCloud Drive.

From now on, the following expiration time applies to iCloud tokens:

  • System backups: 12 hours
  • iCloud Drive data: unlimited, tokens unaffected
  • Synchronized data: unlimited, tokens unaffected
  • iCloud Photo Library: unlimited, tokens unaffected

In practical terms, this means that the same authentication token extracted from the suspect’s computer or pulled from Elcomsoft Phone Breaker’s cached credentials storage could have already ‘expired’ for the purpose of accessing iOS system backups while still ‘valid’ for the purpose of downloading synchronized data (such as call logs, calendars, notes etc.) and obtaining data from iCloud Drive.

More information about the issue is available in our blog:
https://blog.elcomsoft.com/2017/07/icloud-outage-token-expiration/

The updated release of Elcomsoft Phone Breaker is available immediately. The update is free of charge to customers who purchased the product within one year as well as customers with non-expired support & maintenance plans.

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