While we’re eagerly waiting for the jailbreak community to release the untethered or tethered jailbreak for iPhone 4S, iPad 2 and the new iPad (iPad 3), the Chronic Dev team has given a status update on the jailbreak for Apple TV 2 and  the new Apple TV on iOS 5.1.

Chronic Dev team have provided the following details about the iOS 5.1 jailbreak for Apple TV 2:

I’m sure many reading this post are aware that with the geohots A4 limera1n exploit it’s always possible (and quite simple) to jailbreak each new version that is released with relative ease. What isn’t easy is finding an vulnerability for an untethered exploit, and sometimes, massive software changes require a lot of work to achieve cross compatibility with a reasonable range of software versions. As of right now the jailbreak for 5.1 on the AppleTV is limited to a tethered jailbreak, yes I am aware that Stefan Esser (@i0n1c) has an untethered exploit, I don’t know any further details, and am not certain of whether or not he intends to share his research. The tethered jailbreak is only part of the problem, right now we are still busily sorting out legacy and compatibility issues to make sure all roads still go through beigelist when loading third party appliances. I’m not certain how long it will take to merge the differences between beigelist and espresso, hopefully, not much longer.

In one of the tweets, MuscleNerd of the iPhone Dev team had revealed that it was more difficult to jailbreak Apple TV 3 than the new iPad. Chronic Dev team explains what he meant by it:

I’m sure mostly everyone reading this article has probably heard MuscleNerds thought’s on jailbreaking the AppleTV 3, I echo his sentiments. I believe he said the “attack surface” is much smaller, I couldn’t have put it better. There is no built in default web browser, there are less services running, with no web browser and less services running there are fewer places to smoke/fuzz out a vulnerability. For instance, even if the AppleTV 3 was out before the iPad 2 and 4S were jailbroken with absinthe, it would not have been applicable, no mobilebackup to exploit for part of the injection vector. I’m not saying the AppleTV 3 is hopeless, however, without an A5 bootrom exploit being found, each AppleTV 3 jailbreak (after the first one happens) will be an uphill battle. Nothing earth shattering here, wish I had better news on this front.

There has been no major updates on the jailbreak for iPhone 4S, iPad 2 and iPad 3 since our last post (Update: We’ve updated the post with some positive news tweeted by pod2G few hours back). As we had mentioned in that post, Stefan Esser a.k.a i0n1c who has discovered the untethered jailbreak for the new iPad (that would also work with other iOS devices such as iPhone 4S, iPad 2 etc) has clearly stated that he doesn’t plan to release it, which means that we will have to wait for the iPhone Dev team or phoenixdev and chpwn to release the tethered or untethered jailbreak for iPhone 4S, iPad 2 and iPad 3.

We’ll let you know as soon as we’ve any further updates, so stay tuned at iPhone Hacks or join our Facebook Fan page or follow us on Twitter or add us on Google+ or subscribe to our RSS feed.

[via Chronic Dev Team’s blog]