Friday, December 28, 2007

iphones shipped after 45th week cannot be unlocked, as of now

I bought an iphone planning to unlock it. But unfortunately, I discovered lately that my version of the iphone, out of the box (OOTB) 1.1.2, cannot be unlocked yet. After googling around I came to know that this is the case with all the phones shipped after 45th week. This is the case with the phones released in UK also.

It is because of the new bootloader and its enhanced security features. Previous bootloaders (3.9), due to a security flaw, used to allow the baseband firmware to be overwritten with an improperly signed firmware. But the new bootloader(4.x) checks if the baseband firmware is properly signed or not. Unlocking the phone involves replacing the default baseband firmware with a modified firmware which allows the phone to work on any carrier. We have to wait till the hackers find a way to fool the new bootloader and load a modified baseband firmware.

I read in some places that hackers found one possible way to change the baseband firmware on the OOTB 1.1.2 phones. But they are waiting for apple to release their latest 1.1.3 firmware, before they make their hack public. Hope our wait is not too long.

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