ElcomSoft undoes Apple's location security fix

(PhysOrg.com) -- ElcomSoft, a Russian computer forensics company that first came to the attention of the public in 2002 when it was sued and cleared of violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act for its eBook copyright cracking software, is in the news for cracking again and this time the target of their ingenuity is the iPhone. ElcomSoft has developed a toolkit that is designed to help law enforcement agencies to access encrypted file systems on Apple's iPhone and get user location data.

The toolkit, which makes use of the recent news that iPhones track the locations of their users, brings the company into a voracious debate about the security and privacy rights of Smartphone users. The tracking, which Apple claims was a bug in the software, is also found in both Windows Phone 7 and Android operating systems.

Apples fix, iOS 4.3.3, made the law enforcement community unhappy, since they had been using the iPhone and iPad geolocation data in criminal investigations. ElcomSoft has stepped in to fill in the gap in the data by breaking the phones encryption. The CEO Vladimir Katalov said in a statement that this will provide their customers with, " ...full access to all information stored in iPhone devices running iOS 4."

While the company says that it will only make this cracking software available to law enforcement, intelligence, forensic organizations and select government agencies, this new development does create another serious concern about if having a web connection 24/7 is worth the amount of data you are giving up for collection on a daily basis.