Talk:OTA Updates

Encryption

Are the updates encrypted in any way (VFDecrypt?) --Balloonhead66 18:31, 30 August 2011 (MDT)

No. Just regular Zips. --M2m 22:36, 30 August 2011 (MDT)

Only NOR payloads and RAM disks are encrypted, rest of the "asset" is unencrypted --pjakuszew 04:19, 31 August 2011 (MDT)

But if you need to update iTunes to 'decrypt' the newest firmware (as iTunes contains the 'password' to do so), then that means that the encrypted stuff has a 'password' that is somewhere on the file system. Maybe if we could access it, we could get them. (maybe disassembling iTunes could get us them also :D) --Balloonhead66 11:12, 31 August 2011 (MDT)

iTunes doesn't contain any "passwords" Balloonhead66. Everything is done on the device and usually uses the device's built in hardware AES crypt keys. -- iH8sn0w 13:32, 31 August 2011 (EST)

Dang, but then why do we need to update iTunes to update our device? --Balloonhead66 11:35, 31 August 2011 (MDT)

Its purpose is to send out firmware files to the device, and only that. --pjakuszew 11:36, 31 August 2011 (MDT)

I still don't get the point of updating iTunes (other than avoiding an error) --Balloonhead66 11:45, 31 August 2011 (MDT)

Updating is required because of incompatibilites with newer iOS versions. I think it's about Fairplay and encryption of iPod library database. Another example is support of new hardware; how would you update a 3GS with iTunes 7.5? --pjakuszew 11:56, 31 August 2011 (MDT)

Ok, that makes sense. Thanks! --Balloonhead66 12:14, 31 August 2011 (MDT)

Tracker

Anyone into making a watchguard that tracks mesu.apple.com for changes (and records them)? --M2m 00:55, 12 November 2011 (MST)

I did a crude one. It works by comparing against a list of already done URLs in an array --Balloonhead66 13:16, 12 November 2011 (MST)

I would just curl --user-agent="softwareupdateservicesd (unknown version) CFNetwork/539 Darwin/11.0.0" http://mesu.apple.com/assets/com_apple_MobileAsset_SoftwareUpdate/com_apple_MobileAsset_SoftwareUpdate.xml -o OTA.xml and pipe it into shasum. In case shasum change, save as new version with date and time (and display)... --M2m 19:00, 12 November 2011 (MST)

What I did was open a connection with fsockopen(), sent some request headers, then read the response to a string. After that, I parsed the plist to an array. Unfortunately, the parser leaves some artifacts on the hash as it is a compressed hash. So I decided to use the file location instead. It still works pretty well. I had to remove the URL form area as it messed with the array in unwanted ways. I am working on moving it from an array to just line by line URLs preventing the failure as I just append the line to it. When I finish it, I will post the code on my website. --Balloonhead66 21:42, 12 November 2011 (MST)