WTFROST!
Researchers on Friedrich-Alexander Universitãt Erlangen-Nürnberg have found a way to bypass an encrypted Android 4.0 phone (specifically on Nexus phones with Android 4.0 installed) for now. Since Google's Android Ice Cream Sandwich provides a disk encryption feature which of that scrambles user partitions, thus protecting sensitive user information such as contact lists, visited web sites, and photos, directly from RAM.
This is an ease yet tricky method to perform. Why? Encryption is irreversible. The only way to revert to an unencrypted phone is to perform a factory data reset, which may erases all your data.
FROST: Forensic Recovery Of Scrambled Telephones
Yes, that is the acronym of the method here, which by perform cold boot attacks against Android smartphones and retrieve disk encryption keys from RAM, a.k.a your system memory. The unique part is, you should put the phone into a freezer. Cooling the device down under 10 degree Celsius to increases the success of cold boot attacks considerably (as they noted: because RAM contents fade away more slowly if RAM chips are cold).
If you are cool enough to give it a try by any cause happened to your phone, they put the tool set download link too.
image: Courtesy of FAU
