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.

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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }

1 pr0k August 21, 2007 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 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 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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