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Comment by ssl232 | Hacker News Reader

How does that work? Reading between the lines it sounds like it is device dependent, so at least obscure Android phone users might be safe...?

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I would assume security exploits, mostly targeting old unpatched versions, with some undisclosed 0days in the more expensive products.

And against a modern Pixel/iPhone I would also expect the answer to how does it work to be "not so well". Consider the percentage of the population that uses a potato phone from 2018, consider the likelihood of them being the criminal in question, and the product starts working a lot better. Remember how FBI failed to decrypt the iPhone of some domestic terrorists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%E2%80%93FBI_encryption_d...

Also remember that lower-end Android hardware uses a different, cheaper, algorithm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adiantum_(cipher)

Was going do the same question. And was more curious in the

>When time is critical or access is restricted, selectively extract specific data you need to kick-start your investigation

part. With full-device encryption, was expecting it would've been all or nothing.

For what it's worth, Android no longer supports full-device encryption, it encrypts filesystem subtrees. For a single-user phone, there's not much of a difference; your "user files" key is obtained from the hardware secret store when you type your PIN.

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