iPhone 4S Untethered Jailbreak Coming Next Week, ‘With Some Luck’

An untethered jailbreak for iPhone 4S and iPad 2 owners is just around the corner, going by an unexpected tweet from French hacker Pod2g who is wasting no time in developing a cordless hack for A5 devices.

Although he’s working on his own terms developing hacks, Chronic Dev Team member Pod2g apparently doesn’t slack off during the winter holidays.

His latest tweets reveal that he is busy cracking the iPhone 4S and iPad 2, the devices using Apple’s dual-core A5 processor - a longstanding hack-proof piece of hardware that’s about to lose its crown.

“I made a step today for the A5,” Pod2g wrote on Twitter. “With some luck we could expect a release in a week,” said the hacker.

In a follow-up tweet, he added: “Yes, upgrade your 4S and iPad 2 to 5.0.1.” In other words, those who have been refraining from updating to the latest iPhone software can now do so without fear of remaining stuck on that firmware with no jailbreak.

Because Apple has managed to fix all of the previously exploitable holes for jailbreaking iOS devices, Pod2g started work using different methods.

Explaining how Chronic Dev’s Corona untether works, Pod2g wrote in a blog post: “In iOS 5.0, data pages need also to be signed by Apple for the loader to authenticate the binary. @i0n1c seems to be able to pass through these verifications though […] We may see this in the 5.1 jailbreak.”

“Thus, for Corona, I searched for a way to start unsigned code at boot without using the Mach-O loader,” he explains. The hacker then further elaborates on his method.

The exploit he is using, however, does something to the kernel that even Pod2g doesn’t yet fully understand. But he and his fellow hackers are working to achieve a more stable exploit nonetheless.