Hackers Descend on the iPhone
by Muhammad on July 5, 2007
in Uncategorized
The race to hack the iPhone is on. Forum threads are buzzing with action
, but so far the only achievements are the downloading of the iPhone firmware, and some sniffing of the traffic over the USB cable between iTunes and iPhone
The root password, and that of the default user, named “mobile” have also been cracked. That’s significant as the root account gives access to the deepest levels of the operating system (it is also called the “superuser”), but there is no terminal access to enable a login yet.
Immediate goals for hackers atthe moment are:
1) Bypass activation. This is the big one. If achieved, it will open up the possibility of unlocking the SIM lock and also the Network lock (which ties the phone to a particular provider).
2)Install Third Party Software.There were a lot of complaints when Steve Jobs revealed at Apple’s WWDC programmers conference that there would be no software development kit (SDK) for the iPhone. This is understandable. You hardly ever see an SDK on a v1.0 product as the manufacturer wants room to tweak before opening up the platform. Open it too early and simple v1.1 fixes can break third party applications.
This won’t stop hackers trying to install their won software. The iPhone runs full OS X, albeit stripped of the parts a phone doesn’t need, like printer drivers. If hackers can gain access to the file system, they’ll be able to install anything on there. Currently the file system is sandboxed, meaning the the iPhone offers little if any hooks for other programs, but like we say, it’s OS X in there. It won’t be long.
This thread over at Hackint0sh details the root password crack.
The above is a direct copy from here, where there’s a lot more detail…
South Africans (and South African hackers) will need to wait till November before they can experiment on the iPhone, but it’s always better to see what other’s have done and follow on to better innovation. Then again, given the price tag it’s most likely to be in SA, I don’t think many people are going to mess about with it. This is interesting anyhow :)
madly enough i want this phone…hmmmm to think that 500 000 were sold in one wkend amazing hmmm gues aft the ps2 and 3 hypes and xbox this must have been huge…o and they asked me this as an interview q and i knew the answer YAY (am i crazy????be honest here)