Kids are flooding into my office with secrets. Secret calculator app that you don’t know about. Secrets that would give you a mini-heart attack. Secret calculator + you need to know.

Not, my kid.

Yes, I am talking about your kid. You think they’re too young? You think they know better? You think they would never make such poor choices. I can tell you that kids as young as ten and eleven are pouring into my office with tech-savvy skills that would make your head spin. And they are using them to circumvent your primitive, old-school approach to online safety.

I want to respect my kid’s privacy.

Your mom didn’t sneak into your room and read your diary, so why should you snoop on your kid, right? Did your diary have a portal to the outside world? Your kids have a virtual window inside their bedrooms. No need to sneak out, kids just have to turn on their devices and away they go.

Imagine if everything you did as a child got permanently recorded and shared. Every stupid thing. Every bad choice. Every sexual exploit digitally saved for an eternity. Saved for every future boss, partner and offspring to look up. Now do you want to respect your kid’s privacy?

My kids don’t have a phone.

Do they have a computer? A tablet? You don’t give them a phone so you think they’re safe. That’s great, but you can’t cocoon your kids from life forever. Kids will have to enter this digital age. Most have access to computers, even if they don’t have a handy little smartphone in their pocket. Kids can chat, take pictures and send videos all through their computer.

So, what is a secret calculator photo vault?

I thought I was tech-savvy. I mean, I talk to kids for a living. I talk to kids who trust me and tell me things. But my learning curve can’t keep up. Recently I was taking this parenting e-course iParent 101. A course that teaches parents how to keep their kids safe in the digital age. I thought it would be a nice review of what I knew. Wrong. It had me running to check my kid’s phone and tablet in a panic.

It talked about secret photo vault apps also known as private photo vault apps. I had never heard about this before. Where had I been?

A photo vault calculator and other photo vault apps look like innocent apps, like a calculator or a game, but in reality, they are a secret doorway to hide their private photos and videos. Here is a screenshot from the Apple App Store. This app is called Photo Lock Vault, but there are hundreds of more just like it:

Do you know about the secret calculator photo vault? There are secret apps that disguise themselves as "regular apps." Here is what parents need to know!

Screenshot of Photo Lock Vault app from the App Store.

Why do kids need a secret place to hide their photos and videos? Ask any girl in high school (and some even in junior high) if a boy has ever asked them to send a “naked pic.” Most of them will say “yes.” Shocking, but true.

What do you get when you combine hormonal teens, cameras and technology? I will let your imagination sit with that for a minute. Kids aren’t asking for girl’s numbers anymore, they are asking for pics and videos.

This isn’t only disturbing, it is against the law. Because these are digital images of naked kids, it is considered child pornography. And when they share it, the law will see it as producing, distributing and sharing child pornography – a criminal offense.

Sadly, there is also a big trend where men posing as boys get girls (and boys) to take sexually explicit photos and videos for them. These men then threaten to exploit these kids by sharing their photos and videos online or with their parents if they do not pay them. It is called sexting extortion – and it is a thing.

Kids are asking themselves, “How can I hide a video on my iPhone?” Or “What is the best app to hide my pictures and videos?” and this calculator photo video vault is usually the best answer.

You can protect your kids by being more aware.

How does a calculator vault work? Here are the secret calculator app instructions.

Your kid probably has tons of apps on their phone or tablet. The hope is their vault will go undetected in the sea of apps, and it does. A calculator vault looks like a calculator. Acts like a calculator. The only difference? It has a dual purpose. Plug in a 4-digit password and hit pound or make a special finger pattern and voila – your calculator just turned into a secret storage app.

So how can you detect a calculator photo vault?

A calculator photo vault  calculator along with other private photo vault apps are almost impossible to detect. Some obvious signs would be two calculator apps on your kid’s device. But what if they were careful to keep only one calculator? What if it isn’t a fake calculator at all?

An article from Huffington Post, How to Find Vault Photo Apps offers parents some good advice. They suggest you go to the App Store and type in a search for “Vault Apps.” If your child has downloaded a secret vault app it will say “Open” instead of “Get” on the app. The article recommends that you scroll down and make sure you look at all the Vault apps.

Even if you find a calculator app lock, you will have to talk to your child to see what’s behind it. Many apps will report any attempts to try and access the vault, so secretly looking at their vault isn’t probably going to work.

Mobile Photo Video Vault are commonly used to prevent access to sensitive data on the phone (such as images, videos, documents and so on). These Photo Video Vault usually offer a vault with your desired password. You can push any secret files to this vault and they would be secure, as the data present in vault is encrypted and would decrypt only when the correct password is entered. The Fake Calculator app is one such mobile Photo Video Vault which boasted that it “encrypts” and secures your confidential files. All this has now become a joke and we will see why!

Fake Calculator app allows you to pick a private passcode and “encrypts” pictures, texts, and any other data from the eyes of anyone who happens to look through your phone or device. For instance, an attacker who has access to the device should not be able to view the original files unless he knows the passcode. The idea is that even if an attacker pulls these files from the device, since they are encrypted, they would mean nothing but junk. But in case of Calculator app, it turned out that if an attacker pulls these encrypted files, he could easily get the original files in a matter of seconds.

The Fake calculator can not be hacked. Secret Calculator app is one of the best safe vault nowadays. If any can not enter the right passcode, the photo vault cannot be opened. Here is the way to hack NQ Vault for who need it. NQ Vault is one of best Photo Video Vault of Android device.

Breaking it step by step

I tried to verify this practically, and here is how easy it turned out to be:

3. Now send the image to the NQ Vault using the app. This would mean the file apple.png is encrypted and should have been stored somewhere on the device. This is the message shown by NQ Photo Video Vault:

4. These so called “encrypted” files are stored on the SD card at the location /mnt/sdcard/SystemAndroid/Data. How do I know this? Well just by looking at SQLite files in this case. Also at the above mentioned location, there is a text file saved by the app which says:

5. But these encrypted files are hidden from the user. So initially a simple ‘ls’ on the folder does not reveal anything. But ‘ls’ with –a attribute would reveal all the hidden files, as shown in the following screenshot.

6. The next thing is to pull out this encrypted file to the local machine. I used the adb pull command for this purpose. As seen below, the file is stored with a .bin extension.

7. Now see the HEX representation of this encrypted file:

8. Now just XOR abc.png & the encrypted file:\

9. What this suggests is, based on the passcode selected by the user, it generates a “key” (30 in this case) and just XORs the user’s file with this key Photo Video Vault! Upon investigation, it turned out that this key value is always between 00 and ff, which means 255 possible values. As explained by NinjaDoge24, here are some of the passcodes and their corresponding key values:

Thus, an attacker who has access to the encrypted files just need to brute force XOR with 255 possible values to get the original files back!