iPhone 4S Unlock Progress: Baseband Bootrom Now Dumped

The iPhone 4S baseband bootrom has been dumped, according to the iPhone Dev Team’s Musclenerd who confirmed the new developments on Twitter just hours ago. He offered a screenshot as evidence.

As far as unlocks are concerned, Musclenerd had last updated his Twitter profile in November, to confirm the team’s ‘promising’ progress on the iPhone 4S front.

At the time, the hacker wrote: “Crazy Thanksgiving weekend! Very promising 4S unlock […] is in the works (Not i4, just 4S..that's crazy part)”.

We knew at the time that iPhone-Dev were busy working on getting the 4S to work on non-supported carriers, and it now appears that they’re one step closer to that goal.

“iPhone4S baseband bootrom now dumped,” Musclenerd tweeted some three hours ago. An hour later, he returned with a tiny snipped as evidence of their progress. “…we'll be digging into the rest of it too!”, he added.

For those who aren’t very familiar with the technicalities behind Musclenerd’s geeky tweets, the baseband bootrom he’s talking about is the first code that runs on the baseband processor in the internal ROM. Cracking this code gives you easy access to the rest of the code (which also needs to be cracked).

And, to make sense of the screenshot offered by Musclenerd (which reads Qualcomm),  the iPhone 4S baseband processor is made by none-other than Qualcomm. There are currently no known exploits for this chip, but it appears that the iPhone Dev Team are on the verge to pwn it.

As far as jailbreaks are concerned, that’s a different matter altogether. Don’t get the wrong idea - both Dev Team and Chronic Dev are actively working on this in parallel. Tethered jailbreaks are already available for some devices under iOS 5.0.1, but the teams’ goal is to achieve an ‘untethered’ hack.