HDD GURU FORUMS

Hi guys,

I have a lot of experience with forensic analysis but not much "under the hood data" recovery stuff unless you can count
dd_rescue. In my day job I see a lot of locked MMC cards from mobile handsets which are as a result impossible to image, I was
wondering .....

Is it possible to unlock an MMC card that has been locked by a mobile phone handset (i.e Nokia)
under the following conditions:

- without the password
- without losing the data
- possibly without the handset

I've read about MMC commands but as far as I could tell the only way to unlock the card without the password would result in
complete data loss.

I'm sure one of you chaps knows the answer.

Cheers

Andrew

Reading the following thread will probably explain the state of play.......though I am not sure what you would find when you open the package to desolder the chip.

mmc-password-unlock-t7301.html

Doomer wrote:They use standard MMC-command to unlock cards with the whole data erasing like Security Erase on HDD
If you need data - unsolder chip, read it on programmator and decode translator schema to get correct data or unsolder, find the password and reset it then solder it back

It is possible.

Thanks for the replies,

Sounds like as I suspected the only option would be to de-solder these cards.

If I were to start experiment with de-soldering and reading the chips what gear would you guys recommend ?

I've seen some of the salvation data flash gear is it obscenely expensive ?

Thanks for your help so far.

Notice that :

1) not all MMC card can be opened physically (many are molded and/or use CSP)
2) assuming that the card can be opened, not all the chips/chipsets are supported by programmers
3) commercial tools for flash diagnostic / data access are NOT guaranteed to give you access to data, you still have to know some parameters or find by trial and error AND they cost a lot...
4) ... and many systems now do hard encrypt data before writing and decode it on the fly.