Forgotten my screen lock pattern

Hi Tin29,

Sorry to hear of the situation. You could access the information on the phone via a data recovery service.
A swift search on the web should indicate the nearest specialized service near you that will be able to copy all the files with your written consent to a HDD or flash drive.

Hope this helps,
Best wishes,
Max

Hi @vinzf,

Sorry for the confusion caused, allow me to shed some light regards your question.

Yes, the Huawei devices encrypt the internal SD data 100%, but there are services that have the necessary tools to recover the encrypted data from any device- with the users consent of course to flash the drive.
Hopefully the above provided a better understanding to the situation.

I trust this information is of assistance. Should you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact us!
Max

@vinzf Since I noticed the support team cant get passed a few barriers with you, maybe 8 years of working the DRS field will help you get a image.

1. A lot of people just throw the word encryption @ like they know what their talking about, please stop you are embarrassing yourself and the mods that most likely are trying to find a polite way of explaining this to a child.
2. When a phone would come into our office for a DR we would make a magnetic drive copy of the device and depending on the brand and package the customer paid for we would start poking around in the device.

The encryption, like any authorized data service, is already in our workstations within the payed key package the company needs to have in order to get the licensing. Before we would poke in the data to find and get back whatever you would have lost, a big fluffy contract would be thrown at the client and in accordance with that we would see what we can recover.
Unless you have a encrypted hard drive with a encryption key of your own design, that you have never shared with anyone, based on a made-up sequence of 11+ characters, odds are that a DRS service has the certification for the respective key and are ready to do their jobs.

In conclusion stop trying to nitpick, thank the man for his advice like your nan` thought you and move on with your life, for honestly the selfies you would loose are not worth the effort for this topic or the carbon its servers make by hosting it.

@picitup yea it helps to vent after you hear these kind of people all day that don`t even read their contracts then QQ to not watch the screen while we try to save horrible images that burn your soul for days .

@Succuby Thanks for sharing your DRS insight. I do understand your frustration. However, I strongly believe that it does not apply for me. I do have 30+ years system programming experience (kernel and driver programming) .
Regarding it security, I'm very experienced in the mathematical concepts, best practices and software implementations but not in the hardware based implementations (efuses, trusted computing platforms and all that stuff) and I'm also a complete newbie regarding DRS and have no glue about their capabilities, tools and workflows.

Since this is a Huawei forum I'd like to invite you to share how a DRS would recover data from the user filesystem of a modern (e.g. P20 Pro) Huawei device running Android 8, or 9 with a lock screen passcode.

Before doing that please check chapters 4 of the following Huawei documents:

• EMUI 9.0 Security Technical White Paper
• EMUI 8.0 Security Technical White Paper

According to these documents the disk encrypting key is protected using the user lock screen passcode and a key derived by the HUK to prevent unauthorized access to stored data.

The HUK is described as follows:
The HUK is the hardware trust root stored in the eFuse space in the chip, accessible only to the hardware encryption/decryption engine, and variable depending on the device. The HUK provides a device-unique key for lock screen passcode protection and file system encryption.

So the data you retrieve via the process you've described as "making a magnetic drive copy" gives you only the encrypted data.

And my understanding is that you would need both the device-unique key provided by the HUK and the user's pass code to be able to decrypt the data.

And it is also my understanding that these "trusted computing chips" are designed in a way that extracting the decryption key via chip-off or any other low-level method is not possible.

You wrote:
The encryption, like any authorized data service, is already in our workstations within the payed key package the company needs to have in order to get the licensing

Can you elaborate on that? Are you saying that Huawei has backdoors and provides licensed (and paying) DRS companies with options and tools to extract the decryption keys?

Please enlighten us

Hi @benord,

I am sorry to hear about the situation, I can just imagine how frustrating it must be to be locked out of your device.

Unfortunately, there is no official way to bypass the password on your device to access the data unless you perform a factory reset.

There are means to access the data, but we do not encourage doing so nor it is considered authorized.

Therefore, as advised, please continue with your choice based on the information provided above.

I trust this information is of assistance. Should you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact us!
Max