The battle of the Jailbreak and Apple just took a turn towards the Jailbreak community with the discovery of a new iBoot exploit which enables A5X devices to be fully untethered and Jailbroken for life.
So looks like all my A5(X) devices are fully untethered and jailbroken for life now. 🙂
— iH8sn0w (@iH8sn0w) February 1, 2014
iH8Sn0w, the popular Jailbreak developer behind tools such as P0sixpwn and Sn0wbreeze has managed to find an exploit which can be used to offer an untethered Jailbreak for all A5X based devices forever, regardless of iOS version.
An untethered Jailbreak is such that re-Jailbreaking is not required when you reboot your device. The exploits to offer such a Jailbreak is understandably much rarer to come across, so when one is found that is supported by a hardware exploit and consequently cannot be patched is quite exciting.
The last hardware exploit found you’ll recall was by Geohot with LimeRa1n back in October 2010. Since that time, all Jailbreaks have relied on software exploits in order to inject the necessary code but can always be patched by a delta update issue by Apple. The beauty of an iBoot exploit is that it can only be patched with hardware.
Although it’s not a bootrom exploit, iH8Sn0w has elaborated that it is just as powerful and an iBoot exploit can be used for restores, blob dumps, and of course Jailbreaking untethered.
Apple’s A5 and A5X chips power the following iOS devices and are affected by this new iBoot discovery:
- iPhone 4S
- iPad 2, iPad 3, original iPad mini
- iPod touch 5G
Whilst the breakthrough is extremely substantial, it does only affect older devices. As such, iH8sn0w has said that he plans to keep the details private in order to use for future Jailbreaks, and also work on the A6 chip.
Jailbreak
Unfortunately what this doesn’t affect is the Apple TV 3rd Generation, which is yet to be Jailbroken. MuscleNerd chirped up to state that the Apple TV 3 needs either a bootrom exploit or for App development to all of a sudden open for on it – of which neither are likely.
To clear up the ATV3G confusion: the iBoot bug doesn’t apply (a jailbreak is needed to actually trigger it). Don’t go out and buy any!
— MuscleNerd (@MuscleNerd) February 2, 2014
Let us know what you think in the comments below.