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Jailbreak hole in iOS 4.1 will be hard to close

All Steve Jobs's horses and all Steve Jobs's men ...

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Just hours after Apple released iOS 4.1 to great fanfare, hardware hackers found a way to jailbreak devices that run the new operating system. More surprising still, there doesn't appear to be anything Steve Jobs can do to stop them in the near future.

The exploit in the boot ROM of iOS devices was first announced by iPhone Dev-Team member pod2g. It was soon confirmed by other hackers, who said that because the exploit targets such a low-level part of the operating system, Apple won't be able to stop jailbreakers without making significant hardware changes.

That's in stark contrast to previous jailbreak holes, such as the one exploited for weeks on a site called Jailbreakme.com. That hack relied on two software bugs in iOS, allowing Apple engineers to stop the jailbreaking with a simple update. Ironically, an even earlier jailbreak known as the 24kpwn exploit was eliminated by tweaking iPhone 3GS phones to add — you guessed it — the vulnerable boot ROM.

All iPhones, iPod touches, and iPads that have shipped since November contain the same component.

Dev-Team members say there is still work to be done to fine-tune the exploit technique and that would-be jailbreakers are best served by forgoing the update to 4.1 for now. The admonition comes after they called iOS 4.1 a trap designed to prevent future jailbreaking and unlocks. ®

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Limited jailbreaking suits Apple just fine.

I know it's impossible to talk about Apple without hysteria from one side or the other, but Apple/Steve Jobs have/has no interest in killing jailbreaking completely.

Making life just tricky enough for jailbreakers - and with just enough acceptance that what they are doing is off-piste - means that Apple isn't held accountable for problems with their phones as a result, and yet keeps a large number of paying customers within the Apple fold.

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Oh dear.

Surely King Midas would just touch the sea, and it would turn to gold -- presumably solid -- thus stopping the tide.

Or are you thinking of King Knut?

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Maybe they aren't really trying to get it unbreakable?

Locking down an embedded device properly is hard but not impossible - take a look at ADI's LockBox technology for the BlackFin.

Maybe they aren't really trying to get it unbreakable?

Make it hard enough to prevent 90% of the customers from churning, but leave a big enough hole so the other 10% buy and jailbreak the iPhone instead of going elsewhere.

I suspect that plenty of useful iPhone apps are written by propeller heads who would have refused a buy one if it was unbreakable.

If this was not intentional I really feel sorry for the guy who wrote the bootrom.

An assignment like that can only ever end badly. If someone finds a hole you are toast, but even if it does not happen quickly you never know that it won't eventually. And the longer it takes to be broken the more prestigious it becomes and as a result you have an army of hackers attacking a few K of code written by a handful of developers working to a deadline they did not set.

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