Mastery of the iPod Starts Here
iPhone Dev-Team Updates UltraSn0w Unlock, Discusses PurpleSn0w
—–
The day before yesterday, some fellow named geohot released a program called “purplesn0w” which claims to be a better unlock than our ultrasn0w solution. He was kind enough to provide source, which we naturally took apart to try to validate his claims. We’ve found he had come up with some pretty neat ideas, including patching the actual text of the baseband code by copying it over to RAM and then using the MMU and page tables to have the baseband pretend it is part of the original bootrom. Of course, like yellowsn0w and ultrasn0w, this code has to be reloaded with every reboot of the baseband. However, the advantage of this is that developing unlocking payloads is a lot simpler… in fact, geohot used the same payload in AnySim and BootNeuter. We kicked around this idea ourselves before, but eventually found a work-around for the same problem with the yellowsn0w/ultrasn0w payload. The two pieces of code have the exact same effect on the baseband… with the difference that geohot’s exploit overwrites an arbitrary block of memory one megabyte in size. The baseband has a total of eight megabytes of memory and every bit of it is earmarked for use (except for 485212 bytes of it which we haven’t accounted for yet, but that’s still less than 1 MB). This means that eventually the area of memory geohot is using will be corrupted and 1 MB of baseband code will be corrupted (until the next reboot). How soon will this happen? Will it even matter in day-to-day use? We don’t know, because we haven’t spent much time looking. However, why take the risk when the yellowsn0w/ultrasn0w payload accomplishes the same job with no corruption?
P.S. geohot, seriously, stop dicking around and look at the bootrom instead kthx. =P
—–
You can find instructions on how to unlock your iPhone using UltraSn0w here.
Related posts:
- GeoHot Posts Entire Source Code for iPhone 3GS Unlock
- GeoHot Announces RC2 of His PurpleSn0w Unlock
- How to Unlock the iPhone 3GS Using PurpleSn0w
- Apple News iPhone Dev-Team Releases UltraSn0w Unlock for iPhone 3G
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
October 10, 2010 - 10:38 pm
I understand from my experience with the strugle between Jailbreakers and unlockers from one side, and Apple from the other side, that it’s all software that is involved. Now I have a question for you unlockers. If we took the phone apart and disassembled the baseband chip in a phone that runs an earlier unlockable version of software, and copied its contents to the chip in an iphone that runs the new baseband 5.14.02 using a programmer device, wil it work?
October 10, 2010 - 10:38 pm
I understand from my experience with the strugle between Jailbreakers and unlockers from one side, and Apple from the other side, that it’s all software that is involved. Now I have a question for you unlockers. If we took the phone apart and disassembled the baseband chip in a phone that runs an earlier unlockable version of software, and copied its contents to the chip in an iphone that runs the new baseband 5.14.02 using a programmer device, wil it work?