Hacking the iPhone

by Brian Enigma on August 21, 2007 7:53pm

in Gadgets, iPhone

Apple released some new iPhone firmware today.  For­tu­nately, they left in all of the loop­holes for hack­ing your own apps into it.  The last time I hacked my phone, it took about half a day.  This time, it took about 13 min­utes (10 of which were wait­ing for some­thing to down­load.) This is all it took:

Terminal

That’s me typ­ing one com­mand, then me select­ing #3.  Later on, that was me hold­ing down but­tons to reset the phone.  From that point, you’re given an appli­ca­tion on the phone itself for installing addi­tional packages:

Screenshot

Easy!

For future ref­er­ence, when installing the OpenSSH pack­age…
The root pass­word is: dottie
Code to gen­er­ate a new hash is: perl -e 'print crypt("MYPASSWORD", "XX");'

I won­der how many peo­ple install OpenSSH with­out know­ing what it is, and with­out chang­ing pass­words and dis­abling accounts.

If you liked this post, you may also enjoy:

  1. iPhone hack­ing: not good, not bad
  2. iPhone 1.1.3 Jail­break, Attempt 2
  3. My iPhone’s Star Trek SMS tone (a how-to)
  4. iPhone Firmware 1.1.1
  5. iPhone 1.1.3 Jail­break, Attempt 1

{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }

1 pr0k August 21, 2007 8:41pm at 8:41 pm

That’s like the future!  That’s like Blade Run­ner, man!
Does that leave all of the orig­i­nal phone soft­ware so the phone still works?
With openssh installed, does that mean that you can log into it from the inter­web?  Or per­haps try to host scan AT&T’s sub­nets on 22 to find such phones?
GIBSON!

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2 Vortech August 22, 2007 10:46pm at 10:46 pm

Hmm.  Why were we both com­pelled to make our mod­ern computer’s CLI look like an AS400 terminal?

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3 brian August 23, 2007 10:25am at 10:25 am

Pr0k: Yes, all of the orig­i­nal iPhone soft­ware is intact and work­ing, it just adds the abil­ity to install extra stuff and get to a bash prompt.  A “refresh to fac­tory defaults” will revert it back to its orig­i­nal con­di­tion.  I haven’t yet tried it on AT&T, but with T-Mobile, each phone was pretty iso­lated.  Not only could you not see any­one on your sub­net (only the gate­way), you could only make out­bound con­nec­tions.  Con­nec­tions from the inter­net into your phone were blocked at the router.  With AT&T, I ASSUME it works the same, but I might be mak­ing an BUTT out of YOU and I by assum­ing that AT&T does things competently. 

Vortech: I tweaked my ter­mi­nal a bit for the screen­grab.  It’s usu­ally about 30–40% trans­par­ent, but still green-on-black.  One of these days, I am con­sid­er­ing upgrad­ing it by a few years to good ol’ amber-on-black.

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