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Notes -
This morning I stumbled on a lost phone while on my way to the wage cage, and decided to do my good deed for the year and return it to its rightful owner. This took some head scratching since the phone was password-locked, no contacts were saved to the SIM, and he hasn't responded to Telegram DMs (suppose the phone which he lost was his only gateway) so the only thread I had was his employer eventually calling the phone at some point and agreeing to pass on the message when the phoneless man eventually clocks in.
This story is unremarkable and secondary to my actual point, which is that I am a
nosycurious person by nature and a mysterious password-locked phone is burning a fucking hole in my pocket as it waits for its owner; while I solemnly swear that I am up to some good for a change I admit I'm deathly curious if there's anything I could actually do with it if I wanted to without wiping the entire thing. USB file access is obviously disabled, ADB doesn't see it, and the stock Android screen lock seems to be fairly robust and doesn't let me so much as pull down the notification bar... except not robust enough apparently since I could tap Medical Info and pull it down from that menu just fine (which yielded me the employer's number from the missed call notification).Eventually I retraced my chain of thought and realized that it also seems prudent to protect my own phone from people like me just in case, I never lost a phone in all the years I had one (in fact I'm pretty paranoid about keeping it around at all times) but it only takes one lapse in vigilance, and I'm not sure if a stock screenlock/password would be enough. In hindsight I feel horrified at how careless I was in never setting at least a basic screenlock in all these years, god knows I have some, ahem, sensitive things saved on my phone. I'm usually not this sloppy with opsec.
TL;DR:
1)
Any known neat tricks I can make locked Android phones do to spill some parts of their contents, however miniscule? The above medical info trick really made me feel like a proper fucking h4x0r despite how meager it really was, surely there must be more funny loopholes.Alright I suppose this does kind of glow so this part omitted, I was curious about more mundane tricks, not hardcore blackbagging shit. In any case the phone was happily reunited with its owner, and my burning curiosity has passed.2) Main question - what is the easiest way to carve out a private space on the phone to store shit in? Optimally it also shouldn't be indexed by the file explorer or show up in various photo/document/file viewers unless accessed through a specific app/feature, although I'm not sure that's possible. Second Space seems like what I'm looking for but I'm not sure how robust it is and how exactly the "split" works technically, if it's simply a separate group of folders I'm not seeing the point. (I consider myself a fairly tech-savvy person but phones aren't my area of expertise)
The last time I found someone's phone it was so responsibly locked down I couldn't even read notifications.
The best I could do was write my own phone number on a sheet of paper and take a picture of it with their phone. This way it had some chance of appearing in their cloud Photos collection.
But inevitably they had a friend of theirs call it, and I answered, and we arranged a meet.
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How did the phone return to its owner, in the end?
I guess his work colleague that I managed to contact via missed call notification did pass the memo - the owner called the phone later in the day from some other number, his friend's probably. He agreed to meet in the evening in the spot where I found the phone, we met up, I asked him to unlock the phone just in case, he did, I handed it over and walked away with a symbolic sum of money for my trouble and a clean conscience. Fin.
He was pleasantly surprised to recover his jacket too when I pointed it out, seems like he didn't even try to retrace his nightly activities or search for his shit at all.
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Oh, and another way of reuniting a phone with its owner: if there is carrier branding on it, or on the SIM card, bring it to that carrier. They should be able to find more information from the SIM card, from the phone's serial number, etc...
Oh that's actually useful advice I haven't thought of that somehow, thanks. The phone is now reunited with its owner regardless
and my prediction was rightbut that's probably the best course of action.More options
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1 - Honestly the basic device lock of a reputable brand of phone (Apple, or one of the big non-chinese Android) is beyond the capabilities of the common of mortals; it usually takes intelligence agency level ressources to even consider it. And it's likelier that those agencies simply have a backdoor in place anyway or trust in their ability to lean on the device manufacturer to help them in. Or they'll use the 5$ wrench bypass.
Now outside of the basic lock, there's a few things to consider. Some manufacturers have online accounts that have features that, if enabled, could potentially be used to reset a device's lock. I think Apple forces you to wipe your phone, and I think Samsung does too now. But at least it used to be an option, and probably still is for some manufacturers.
The main way people get their phone hacked is not through the lock screen, but by installing things they should not, the same as on the computer. But instead of Roblox hacks, they see an ad telling them they can get free premium currency in their favorite gacha waifu skinner box by installing this one off store APK and give it permissions to everything.
2 - I don't know Second Space, but as I use Samsung I do know the Secure Folder; it's not just a separate set of folders, it's more separate than that; apps in the standard context cannot see or interact with the data and apps in the Secure Folder context. I'm not sure exactly how they do it, but theoretically that part is not a difficult thing to do.
What is more difficult, is making sure the operating system itself doesn't leak the data; as it necessarily have access to both sides of the fence. For instance, that happened very recently with Samsung: https://www.sammobile.com/news/we-found-a-security-flaw-in-one-ui-7-secure-folder/ (to be fair, it's not necessarily a security bug as the settings probably work as Samsung thought it should, but it's a UX oversight that can likely lead to unintended disclosure for the user).
Ultimately though, that is the root problem of all computer security: computers are fancy calculators, they are not conceptually inclined to protect information. They have to be tricked into protecting information, and it's easier to trick them into disclosing it.
Yeah that's how I imagine the failure mode/drawback of such things, I have a cheap-ish xiaomi phone and the Second Space feature AIUI is essentially a second "desktop"/container you can switch to at will that's running the same OS, and the two are essentially separate installs beyond the basic features. It sounds impressive (and a hassle to set up) so I wonder how it's actually done under the hood and whether the filesystems are somehow separate too without it being obvious.
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The unfortunate man's data is none of your business to snoop in. Don't be a dick.
As I said this particular guy's data holds zero interest to me, ~90% odds this is some random local alcoholic who dropped the phone during some scuffle (a torn jacket hanging off a nearby bush did not fill me with confidence), I'm curious about the methods/tricks in general. Besides, if I didn't "snoop" the missed call notification I would've had literally zero clues towards the actual owner short of putting up posters or something, which definitely sounds like too much effort.
As far as I know, yes, there are forensic tools that could do some of what you want. You likely can't get them legally unless you're a LEO or something like that, but probably if you have access to the right darknet places you can get at least some of those (it's just code after all so anybody could use it). I have no personal experience though with this, just stuff that I read about in various places on the internet (which as we all know only contains true and verified information and can be always trusted). Most of the tools would rely on some bugs or logic holes so success of applying them to a particular phone would highly depend on the model, OS version, settings, etc.
There was a famous case where the FBI had trouble accessing San Bernadino shooter's iPhone (Apple can be better than random Android in this due to the fact that they can have unified model covering everything) but they were able to successfully break the protection anyway. The people who specialize in it likely have a lot more tricks in their bags, but those are not going to be revealed to a random dude, they a worth quite a lot of money and they won't do it for everybody. If you were an FBI officer, you probably would be able to get them to help you.
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