If you’ve launched Cydia in the last 24 hours then you may have noticed that the message which read “See TSS Center (below) to request iOS SHSH” and a new TSS Center.
If you’re wondering what happened to the iOS 6 – iOS 6.1.2 SHSH files that were automatically saved on Cydia, Jay Freeman aka saurik, founder of Cydia has written a long article explaining what exactly happened to them.
He writes:
I am here to be the bearer of bad news that will likely cause me to get a ton of hatemail. 🙁 Specifically, I am writing this to tell everyone that the TSS data Cydia saved for iOS 6.0-6.1.2 is unusable. I’m also going to attempt to explain some background on the process, what the mistake was, and what users can now do instead.
After providing background on what some of the terms mean, Saurik goes on to explain why the TSS data or SHSH blobs saved for iOS 6 – iOS 6.1.2 are unusable.
The word “useless” is important, as it is not accurate to use the word “corrupt”: the data that was uploaded was not lost or damaged, and in fact all of the tickets that were stored verified per the algorithm from MuscleNerd.
Instead, the requests being made via Cydia to collect SHSH information for iOS 6 did not result in useful tickets. This is because, in order to better emulate the requests Apple had been making when I first started the service, I filter the manifests I send to Apple to only include information about files that had the partial digests I discussed earlier, as only files that have partial digests are relevant for SHSH.
However, the APTicket signs complete digests, not partial digests, and so even descriptions of files that do not have partial digests need to be sent to TSS to get a complete ticket. What really should therefore be used as a filter is “files with digest information at all”, not just those that have partial digests (there is never a partial digest without a full digest), effectively finding all “real” files.
The result is that the APTickets that were downloaded and saved by Cydia itself are not sufficient to boot a device.
The good news is that if you’ve used Redsn0w, TinyUmbrella or iFaith then the tickets obtained will work fine. If those tickets were uploaded to Cydia and downloaded back, then even those will continue to work.
However, since there is no way to downgrade to a previous version on devices that came preinstalled with iOS 6 or later, the APTickets are anyways useless for these devices.
As for older devices that are capable of running iOS 6 such as iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 can still grab the TSS data using Redsn0w.
redsn0w has the ability to dump the full TSS information from a device (also using that same limera1n exploit). I thereby encourage users of devices capable of being exploited by limera1n (the iPhone 3G[S], iPhone 4, or 4th generation iPod touch) to download this tool right now and use it to upload complete TSS information.
Saurik has launched a new TSS Center on Cydia, which also allows you to request both SHSH and APTickets from Apple’s servers to save them on Cydia servers, so it may be a good idea to save them by following these instructions:
- Launch Cydia
- Scroll down and tap on the TSS Center (SHSH & APTicket) link.
- Then tap on the Save 6.1.3 Now link.
- You will momentarily see a message telling you “Requesting from Apple…”.
- You should see iOS 6.1.3 listed at the top, which indicates that the SHSH and APTicket were successfully saved for your device for iOS 6.1.3.
Let me know how it goes. If you still confused about the current situation with iOS 6 TSS data, I would also strongly recommend you to read Saurik’s article.
