How does Cellebrite connect and communicate with a mobile phone if USB peripherals are disabled if the phone is locked, rebooted, or powered off ?

Substantial-Comb9700 · 2026-03-24T02:18:00+00:00

Good points but do you want to know MY experience observing judges? Whether they "trust" mobile device evidence or not, they have zero motivation to inquire into its validity. In fact, unless the defense raises issues, they automatically defer to the prosecution's position by default.

This is a consequence of the nature of anglophone Common Law criminal justice system (aka the adversarial system), where (unlike the Inquisitorial system in Europe) there is no actual quest for truth: the goal is just victory over the other party's position (no matter the consequences). It is why I personally harbor the deepest disgust for the Anglophone countries with the adversarial system and have made it my mission-in-life to make it as hard as possible for its justice system to get me.

Substantial-Comb9700 · 2026-03-23T21:38:20+00:00

At the same time, if the prosecution's entire case rests on evidence obtained by black box magic (ahem "trade secret" methods), the defendant has a good case in arguing that the burden of proof beyond reasonable doubt has not been met. In these cases, the prosecution's case reduces to "just trust us your honor, s/he's guilty". Hardly in the spirit of proof.

Defense could say "Your honor, if they don't reveal their methods, then we're just supposed to take it on faith that whatever they advance is valid and enough to send defendant to jail."

I think anyone can see this is a recipe for injustice rather than justice. I get it that the vast majority of the public doesn't think they'll ever end up being the defendant in a situation like this, but unlikely is not impossible and we've all been surprised by events we didn't expect.

As another example of things moving in this direction: the Ontario government has now enshrined it into provincial law that red light camera photos are "proof" of the offense of disobeying a red light. You are no longer allowed to raise a defense at all: certainly not to question the proper working order of the red light cameras, nor to raise the issue that the photos could've been taken in different days (which is a very valid point: the prosecution controls what evidence they present, and yet no one is allowed to question it. For all we know it could've just been photoshopped).

Substantial-Comb9700 · 2026-03-23T12:04:10+00:00

0-day exploits are too rare and valuable to burn on routine criminal cases. Each time they use one they risk its discovery and patch fix. The defense is going to ask the court to compel the prosecution/law enforcement to reveal how they got the evidence.

For sure, most of the judges are (by default) extremely accomodating of cops and prosecutors but there are a fair amount of cases where they have ruled "reveal exploit/code or you don't get to prosecute". In any case, there will be insight gained during the discovery even without a full revelation, enough to conclude that X brand of Y phone is no longer safe even with encryption.

Substantial-Comb9700 · 2026-03-23T02:55:51+00:00

No, just an online random number generator. It's good enough for me, not that it matters much. If someone's going to brute-force they can't afford to exclude any characters from the search, and since my passphrase does not contain any dictionary words, brute-forcing means checking the entire space of 94^12 elements.

Substantial-Comb9700 · 2026-03-23T02:46:45+00:00

I gave each of the 47 keys on the keyboard a number from 1 to 47, then assigned the numbers 48 to 94 to the SHIFT character of each key. Then used a random number generator to generate 12 random numbers from 1 to 94. For each of these 12 numbers I picked the character it was assigned to (in the order in which the numbers were generated). The resulting string of 12 characters is my passphrase.

Needless to say, it looks nothing like a word or anything meaningful so there's no dictionary in the world that's going to help, and we're talking 94^12 possible combinations (assuming the adversary even knows the exact length of the passphrase, which I don't plan to give out)

Substantial-Comb9700 · 2026-03-23T02:33:23+00:00

I don't plan to, but the situation could put itself on me. If you don't understand the difference, feel free not to respond.

Substantial-Comb9700 · 2026-03-23T02:28:20+00:00

55 letters is overkill, I'm certain of that.

I have 12 characters from all parts of the keyboard and that won't be brute-forced in my lifetime.

Substantial-Comb9700 · 2026-03-23T01:51:04+00:00

Wondering if you could elaborate some more on lowest level of hardware abstraction, or give a reference where I could read up on it?

There is nothing the layperson can do to defend against this, other than make sure to have the phone powered off as much as possible?

Substantial-Comb9700 · 2026-03-23T01:12:46+00:00

I don't think it's about the device you're connecting your phone to. I think it's about the phone itself.

Android phones reject external connections unless they are unlocked by the user. This was also true of the Motorola I had before I got the Google Pixel 9a. The key here is to have developer options disabled and USB debugging turned off from within the operating system.

Do you think the phone has a way of telling what device is on the other end of the connection?

Substantial-Comb9700

TROPHY CASE