14 DAY TRIAL // The owners of iOS devices who eagerly awaited greenpois0n on Sunday, had the surprise to get a similar jailbreak from a separate hacker and as it turns out, it's based on different boot ROM exploit.
On September 8, hackers from the Chronic Dev Team announced that they created an exploit for a bug located in the boot ROM of fourth generation iOS devices.
The exploit was later dubbed SHAtter and was supposed to serve as base for a boot ROM-level jailbreak called greenpois0n.
Boot ROM-based jailbreaks are significantly better than firmware-based ones, because Apple can't simply undo them via an iOS update.
The vendor's only option to stop such jailbreaks is to patch the hole in the boot ROM of newly manufactured devices, which wouldn't remove it from older ones.
Chronic Dev team members hoped to deliver greenpois0n as a simple to use package last Sunday on 10/10/10 at 10:10:10 am GMT.
However, on October 9, a long-time iPhone hacker named George Hotz (geohot), believed to have retired from the scene, released a beta version of a new boot ROM-level jailbreak from iOS devices called limera1n.
Initially, people believed that geohot might have stolen SHAtter and used it to create his own package, but it turns out that limera1n uses an entirely different boot ROM exploit.
Geohot's jailbreak, which has since been polished, works on iPhone3GS, iPhone4, iPod touch 3G, iPod touch 4G, the iPad, and theoretically, the new AppleTV 2G.
As a result of this unexpected release, the Chronic Dev Team decided to save SHAtter for the next generation of iOS devices, that will most likely come with an updated boot ROM.
Obviously, there's no guarantee that Apple won't discover the bug exploited by SHAtter and patch it before releasing the new versions of its products.
Meanwhile, greenpois0n has also been released, but it is also based on geohot's exploit and so far people have reported some problems with it.