The iPhone 4S has been available for about two months, yet it has no jailbreak. The iPad 2 has been available for the better part of a year and it can only be jailbroken on an ancient version of iOS 4 (4.3.3). It’s dark times for the jailbreak community, but there may be hope. The hacker who may have the best chances of cracking the iPhone 4S’s defenses says he is making progress.
The A5 processor is Apple’s best yet defense against jailbreaking. It was cracked once, but only briefly. Apple was quick to patch the exploit and it has since been impenetrable. Making matters worse, the maestro behind the only jailbreak, Comex, is now working for Apple.
The jailbreak community’s best hope against the A5 fortress is a hacker named pod2g. He has an untethered jailbreak for A4 devices in the works, but he may also have something up his sleeve for the A5; the hacker says that progress has been made on the iPhone 4S, but obstacles remain.
pod2g says he is close to an untethered iPhone 4S jailbreak, but he is being thrown off by processor cache issues. It has something to with the Cortex A9 cache management system. He says it may be sorted quickly, or it may not. pod2g promises an update on his progress by tomorrow.
Once an essential way of doubling the capabilities of the iPhone,
jailbreaking has been thwarted over the last year. Apple has waged a soft war on the hacking community with a three-fold strategy: implementing the best jailbreak features, hiring away the best talent, and making its processors as hack-proof as possible. It’s been a successful strategy that has left the most popular tablet almost hack-proof for nearly a year, and the latest iPhone completely hack-proof for two months.
One thing we have learned about the cat-and-mouse game is that the jailbreak community is a hacking Hydra; when one head is cut off, another grows to take its place. If pod2g can successfully hack the 4S (and iPad 2?), the mouse will, once again, have the upper hand over the cat. It’s only a matter of time.
