14 DAY TRIAL // Third-generation Apple TV buyers looking to jailbreak and run third-party apps are out of luck. The people behind Greenpois0n are letting everyone know that it’s going to be very complicated to find a vulnerability to crack Apple’s new set-top box.
Chronic Dev member “bile” writing over at greenpois0n.com says he resonates with the iPhone Dev Team’s MuscleNerd regarding the Apple TV 3, in that it presents few hackable components (software-wise).
“I’m sure mostly everyone reading this article has probably heard MuscleNerds thought’s on jailbreaking the AppleTV 3, I echo his sentiments,” he writes. “I believe he said the ‘attack surface’ is much smaller, I couldn’t have put it better.”
Bile elaborates, saying that Apple’s puck-sized set-top box not only has no built-in web browser, it has less services running. According to the poster, “with no web browser and less services running there are fewer places to smoke/fuzz out a vulnerability.”
Bile explains that even if the new Apple TV had come out before the A5-based iPad 2 and iPhone 4S, there still wouldn’t have been any applicable exploits for the black box, saying “no mobilebackup to exploit for part of the injection vector.”
“I’m not saying the AppleTV 3 is hopeless, however, without an A5 bootrom exploit being found, each AppleTV 3 jailbreak (after the first one happens) will be an uphill battle. Nothing earth shattering here, wish I had better news on this front,” he concludes.
Owners of the second-generation Apple TV can jailbreak using fireCore’s Seas0nPass. However, the hack currently doesn’t support the new 5.0 (iOS 5.1 - 9B179b) software that was released on March 7th. fireCore promises to update Seas0nPass and release the 5.1-supported version soon. Older Apple TV software versions can also be used with Seas0nPass, but only if the user has saved firmware signatures.