iPhone Dev Team Responds to Limera1n 4.1 Jailbreak

The recent iOS 4.1 jailbreak scene has hit some ‘drama’ as notorious iPhone hacker Geohot has splashed back into the scene out of nowhere with his recently released limera1n jailbreak.

The iPhone Dev Team has responded with a recent blog post shedding their opinions and thoughts on the latest limera1n jailbreak:

 

After a few very dramatic days in the jailbreak community, geohot has come out of nowhere to release limera1n. It’s a bootrom-level jailbreak that works on the iPhone3GS, iPhone4, iPod touch 3G, iPod touch 4G, the iPad, and (technically) the AppleTV 2G.

 

DO NOT USE LIMERA1N IF YOU USE THE ULTRASN0W CARRIER UNLOCK — wait for PwnageTool to incorporate the limera1n exploit. This is so that you can avoid updating your baseband and losing the unlock (possibly forever).

Limera1n uses a different exploit than SHAtter, and in fact covers more devices. Although some may question geohot’s dramatic and competitive style, he obviously does have considerable skill pulling this together in just over a day (although he’s had the underlying exploit for months). Credit also goes to @comex, who provides the untethered aspect of limera1n via another one of his growing list of kernel hacks.

The release of limera1n has (hopefully!) averted the burning of 2 bootrom holes at once (both his and SHAtter). Releasing SHAtter now would be a complete waste of a perfectly good bootrom hole in light of limera1n, and so it can be held until Apple closes limera1n’s hole. While there’s no guarantee that Apple won’t also close SHAtter by then, it provides a ray of hope for devices after Apple’s bootrom respin. Meanwhile, look for an alternate implementation of the limera1n exploit in greenpois0n (and possibly other tools), where it should undergo more testing too.

Limera1n wasn’t tested very thoroughly and does have some issues. Geohot typically works these out in subsequent (and rapid) releases (there are already 3 beta versions of it as of Saturday night!). In the meantime, feel free to discuss any problems and their solutions in our comments section.

 

Essentially, if you’re going to try limera1n, use it at your own risk. It’s a bit buggy right now but people have had success with it. If you care about the ultrasn0w unlock (for using your iPhone with another carrier SIM), stay away from limera1n for now.

It was pretty brass for Geohot to come out like this and force the Chronic Dev Team’s hand to remake their release to have it updated with limera1n instead of the SHAtter exploit. It does make sense to have Apple cover up one hole instead of two. The way that Geohot went about it did take everyone by surprise. Regardless, his actions could have very well saved the iPhone hacking community a lot of work for the next time around. Kudos to all of these guys for their amazing work!

[iPhone Dev Team]