When Ice Cream Sandwich was rolled out by Google for Android smart devices, engineers baked a data scrambling system into the operating system, which made it a nightmare for law enforcement and forensic workers to unscramble the devices, according to the Erlangen’s Friedrich-Alexander University (FAU) team.

Of course, the data scrambling system makes it significantly harder for just about anyone – good or bad – to get into the brains of your Android device.

But! Researchers Tilo Muller, Michael Spreitzenbarth and Felix Freiling from FAU discovered something interesting when they placed the Android phones in a freezer for an hour, exposing the phones to temperatures of -10C. The team found that when subjected to very cold temperatures, it is possible to quickly connect and disconnect the battery of the phone, leaving it in a vulnerable state, allowing the team to use custom built software to boot up the phones, overriding the Android software. At that point they were able to copy the data and later analyse it on a separate computer.

They aptly dubbed the hack,  FROST – Forensic Recovery of Scrambled Telephones.

Tilo Muller said:

We thought it would work because smartphones are really small PCs, but we were quite excited that the trick with the freezer worked so well.

[Source: BBC News]