Greenpois0n (jailbreak)

This article is about the jailbreak. For the toolkit, see greenpois0n (toolkit).

Available for Windows and Mac.

History

RC1 - RC4

Greenpois0n was originally written using two exploits: SHAtter (a bootrom exploit) as well as a userland kernel exploit provided by Comex to make the jailbreak untethered. A release date of 10/10/10 10:10:10 AM (GMT) was announced, as well as the list of supported devices. Due to the nature of SHAtter, only iDevices using the A4 Processor were supported. geohot later released another jailbreak (limera1n using a different bootrom exploit) on 9 October 2010, which led to a delay in greenpois0n's release (to implement geohot's exploit, not SHAtter).

RC5

Posixninja and the rest of Chronic Dev released a Mac-exclusive version of greenpois0n RC5 on 3 February 2011, which performs an untethered jailbreak on iOS 4.2.1 for most devices that support it. Instead of using the Packet Filter Kernel Exploit like RC4 and earlier, RC5 made use of the HFS Legacy Volume Name Stack Buffer Overflow. (This exploit wasn't saved for iOS 4.3 because it was already fixed in the betas with an implementation of ASLR.) Bugs were found, and fixed, in subsequent builds. Two days later, on 5 February 2011, Chronic Dev released a Windows version as well.

RC6

Support for the Apple TV (2nd generation) was added. This release was for both Windows and Mac.

Controversy

There was much controversy surrounding the sudden release of limera1n and the motives behind it. The main reasons for the limera1n release were:

• Use an exploit that Apple already knew about (newer iBoots shows the exploit patched)
• Supports more iDevices than SHAtter
• Save the SHAtter bootrom exploit for future devices

The reason for this is bootrom exploits are not patchable with software updates. It requires new hardware to fix the security hole. Since the limera1n hole was already discovered and patched by Apple, it benefits the community if SHAtter is saved in hopes of using it with new hardware, like the iPhone 4S, iPod touch (5th generation), and the iPad 2. However, Apple, presumably through internal testing, found out about SHAtter and patched it in the A5 chip released with the iPad 2.

Supported Devices

greenpois0n RC4 and earlier requires the device to be on either iOS 3.2.2 (iPad) or iOS 4.1 (all other devices). Of the devices that support these firmware revisions, the only one not supported is the iPhone 3G.

greenpois0n RC5 requires the device to be on iOS 4.2.1. It is compatible with every device that has 4.2.1, except for the iPhone 3G. It was released earlier than anticipated, because iOS 4.3 unintentionally blocked the HFS Legacy Volume Name Stack Buffer Overflow‎ exploit.

Output

iPhone 4 with greenpois0n output (via iRecovery):

Attempting to initialize greenpois0n
Initializing commands
Searching for cmd_ramdisk
Found cmd_ramdisk string at 0x8401c7ac
Found cmd_ramdisk reference at 0x84000d64
Found cmd_ramdisk function at 0x84000cd1
Initializing patches
Initializing memory
Initializing aes
Searching for aes_crypto_cmd
Found aes_crypto_cmd string at 0x84021a8c
Found aes_crypto_cmd reference at 0x84017bb8
Found aes_crypto_cmd fnction at 0x84017b51
Initializing bdev
Initializing image
Initializing nvram
Initializing kernel
Greenpois0n initialized