The Alameda County Sheriff received a grant in 2016 for $219,000 under the California State Homeland Security Grant Program to update its existing Cellebrite device. The logs also show that Alameda County used its Cellebrite to attempt to unlock phones for the Piedmont Police Department, the Albany Policy Department, the Pleasanton Police Department and the UC Berkeley Police Department. Information about whether the attempts were successful was redacted from the logs. One advantage of the GrayKey is that it’s substantially cheaper than the Cellebrite device.Īccording to logs provided by the Alameda County Sheriff, its Cellebrite UFED has been used 30 times to attempt to gain access to locked cell phones. Since the Cellebrite Universal Forensic Extraction Device (UFED) can access locked iPhones running up to iOS 12.3, it’s not clear why the Alameda County Sheriff felt the need to buy an additional tool to access locked phones. A first-year discount of $500 and a $75 domestic shipping and handling charge brought the total to $36,075. GrayKey is a product of GrayShift, a company cofounded by a former Apple engineer.Ī May 14, 2019, quote from GrayShift lists the price of the Gray Key device as $500 plus $36,000 for an annual offline license for unlocking an unlimited number of phones. The grant lists $30,000 for the “GrayKey Forensic Encryption Bypass Tool.” GrayKey is a tool for obtaining access to iPhones that are locked with a passcode or password.

The grant requires that the money be spent by December 31, 2019.Īcceptance of the grant was approved by the Alameda County Board of Supervisors on July 9, 2019. The Paul Coverdell Forensic Science Improvement Program grant is funded by the National Institute of Justice, the research, development and evaluation agency of the U.S. Although the Alameda County Sheriff already had a Cellebrite cell phone extraction device it purchased in 2018 for more than $200,000, the Sheriff was recently awarded $30,000 to acquire GrayKey, which has similar functionality.

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