Apple Makes Future iPhones Jailbreak-Proof

It’s widely reported that Apple is now shipping iPhone 3GS units which are jailbreak-proof, trying to end the cat and mouse game. The new iPhone units will come with a new bootrom that can resist to the existing jailbreak technique. Presently, jailbreaking relies on the so-called 24kpwn exploit that allows iPhone hackers to bypass the bootrom signature on low-level bootloader and makes jailbreaking possible. As claimed by MobileCrunch, Apple now completely closes this exploit by shipping iPhones with new bootrom. That means, if you still haven’t owned an iPhone 3GS and plan to buy one, it’s very likely you’ll get an iPhone that is jailbreak-proof. Quoted from MobileCrunch:

If you want the full technical rundown of the exploit, you can find it here. In its simplest form: as with all computers, the iPhone requires something called a “Bootrom” to startup. During the startup process, one stretch of code in the Bootrom fails to ensure that the content being loaded is within a certain size limit. By throwing more instructions at that chunk of code than it’s intended to handle, exploiters are able to make the iPhone do damn near whatever they want; in this case, the jailbreaking process.

It sounds like that the new bootrom will end the jailbreak game. Really? Wired.com has interviewed Eric McDonald, a member of the iPhone Dev-Team and here was what Eric mentioned.

“It’s not going to be impossible to jailbreak even if the exploit we used is gone,” said Eric McDonald, a member of the iPhone Dev-Team, which publishes tools to jailbreak the iPhone, in a phone interview with Wired.com.

McDonald explained that current tools will still work with the latest batch of iPhone 3GS units. The “24kpwn” exploit used to help jailbreak previous iPhones and iPod Touch devices only made it easier to boot up the hacked devices.

The newly shipping iPhone 3GS’s bootrom interferes with 24kpwn, but that will only make the handset difficult to start up after it shuts down. Booting up will require being “tethered” to a computer. That means if you shut down a jailbroken iPhone 3GS, or if it runs out of power, you can only turn it back on by plugging it into a computer.

In short, the new bootrom will not completely end the jailbreak game. It’ll just make jailbreaking more difficult and iPhone hackers to take more time to find another exploit. As long as there is a need for jailbreaking, you’ll continue to see iPhone hackers working out great jailbreaking solution. It’s still an endless cat-and-mouse game.