SHAtter Will Jailbreak All Existing iOS Devices For Life

BY Jason

Published 11 Sep 2010

iOS 4.1

We had reported that iPhone hacker pod2g of the Chronic Dev Team had discovered a bootrom exploit that could help in jailbreaking iOS 4.1. We have more details about the exploit.

The exploit that pod2g has discovered is the first exploit of the S5L8930 chip, Apple’s A4 chip, which is used in iPhone 4, iPad and iPod Touch 4G.

The bootrom exploit allows the use of unsigned code execution, which could help in creating a tethered jailbreak called SHAtter, a jailbreak for life.

It looks like the same exploit was discovered by Geohot who had abandoned the iPhone hacking community couple of months back.

Since the exploit was discovered on Apple’s A4 chip running iOS 4.1, the tethered jailbreak should work with the current and older iOS devices. Tethered means that the jailbreak needs to be reapplied every time you power down your iOS device. If you let the battery run out or restart your iPod touch then you will need to reapply the jailbreak by connecting to your computer (tethering).

As we’ve explained in our earlier post, a bootrom exploit is a low level exploit that can’t be fixed by Apple with a software update like it did with iOS 4.0.2 to patch the security hole used by JailbreakMe.

Apple can prevent jailbreaking by releasing devices with a new bootrom that patches the exploit, but Apple won’t be able to stop users from jailbreaking devices with the older bootrom.

The iPhone Dev team and Chronic Dev team are currently working hard to bring the jailbreaking tools to users but it is expected to take sometime.

We’ll let you know as soon as we’ve any further updates. So stay tuned here at iPhone Hacks or follow us on Twitter or subscribe to our RSS feed.

[via ModMyI]