In one of those "why would anyone ever think to try something like this" moments, researchers have discovered that freezing encrypted Android devices will allow them to gain access to previously encrypted data. The encryption scheme used by Android has been a "nightmare" for law enforcement, though it looks like this won't be the case for much longer.

Tilo Muller, Michael Spreitzenbarth and Felix Freiling, researchers at Erlangen's Friedrich-Alexander University, placed Android phones into a freezer until they were below -10C. For some reason, this allowed them to quickly connect and disconnect the battery, placing the phone into a vulnerable mode.

Once the phone was in this state, they could load custom software onto the device. Known as Forensic Recovery of Scrambled Telephones, or FROST for short, the software allowed the data to be copied off to a computer for analysis. Luckily for consumers, the group of researchers are now attempting to figure out a way to prevent this hack from working.