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Limera1n
This is geohot's latest jailbreak utility. It uses his undisclosed exploit, along with comex's userland exploit, to achieve an untethered jailbreak on newer devices.
- iPhone 3GS
- iPhone 4
- iPod touch 2G (support announced, not released)
- iPod touch 3G
- iPod touch 4G
- iPad
- AppleTV (However it's current usefulness is debatable)
It has been demonstrated multiple times by geohot, using blog posts on his now private blog. Geohot showed off a high-res picture of Cydia on an iPhone 4. He displayed an iPod touch 3G with an untethered jailbreak that met MuscleNerd's requirements for a good video. In addition, he took a picture of Cydia and blackra1n icons on his iPad's SpringBoard.
limera1n was released to the public on October 9, 2010, delaying the release of greenpois0n, because greenpois0n has to be rewritten to use the limera1n exploit instead of SHAtter. It only supports Windows at the moment, and there are some devices with issues.
Contents
Release text
iPhone 3GS, iPod Touch 3G, iPad, iPhone 4, iPod Touch 4G
4.0-4.1 and beyond+++
limera1n is unpatchable
untethered thanks to jailbreakme star comex
released today to get chronicdev to do the right thing
brought to you by geohot
hacktivates
Mac coming soon
follow the instructions in the box, sadly limera1n isn't one click
that's the price of unpatchability
as usual, donations appreciated but not required
still in beta, pardon my ragged edges
AppleTV is technically supported, but theres no apps yet
Credit
- geohot - the program itself, and bootrom exploit.
- comex - userland exploit that allows limera1n to run untethered.
Changelog
beta 1 | 9 Oct 2010 XX:XX GMT | 2f2b09a6ed5c5613d5361d8a9d0696b6 | First release. | http://www.mediafire.com/?6ywtz1van4f9cya |
beta 2 | 9 Oct 2010 XX:XX GMT | a70dccb3dfc0e505687424184dc3d1ce | Fixed kernel patching magic. Rerun BETA2+ over BETA1. | http://www.mediafire.com/?qo4jech54sx4x15 |
beta 3 | 9 Oct 2010 XX:XX GMT | 81730090f7de1576268ee8c2407c3d35 | Fixed an issue with iPhone 3GS (new bootrom) | http://www.mediafire.com/?mhyf4jn0rtgwtkl |
beta 4 | 9 Oct 2010 XX:XX GMT | d901c4b3a544983f095b0d03eb94e4db | Uninstall fixed, respring fixed | http://www.mediafire.com/?k50w8esfmw715of |
RC1 | 11 Oct 2010 XX:XX GMT | 0622d99ffe4c25f75c720a689853845f | out of beta! afc2, reliability improvements, no reboot for cydia, 2kb smaller | http://www.mediafire.com/?k50w8esfmw715of |
Technical Information
Basics
- limera1n does not use SHAtter.
- limera1n uses a bootrom exploit to achieve the tethered jailbreak and unsigned code execution.
- limera1n uses a userland exploit to make the jailbreak untethered, which was developed by comex.
Exploits
Details of the bootrom exploit to follow.
Process
The jailbreak appears to execute something like the following (in no particular order):
- In recovery1,
"setenv debug-uarts 1 setenv auto-boot false saveenv"
"setenv auto-boot true reset geohot done"
Interesting Messages
"geohot black is the new purple"
"blackra1n start: %d current IRQ mask is %8.8X usb irq disabled...shhh fxns found @ %8.8X %8.8X found iBoot @ %8.8X i'm back from IRQland... 3g detected, kicking nor nor kicked memcpy done iBoot restored!!! found command table @ %8.8X cmd_geohot added time to pray...%8.8X"
"2.2X send command(%d): %s send exploit!!! sent data to copy: %X sent shellcode: %X has real length %X never freed: %X sent fake data to timeout: %X sent exploit to heap overflow: %X sending file with length: 0x%X Mingw runtime failure: VirtualQuery failed for %d bytes at address %p Unknown pseudo relocation protocol version %d. Unknown pseudo relocation bit size %d."
Controversy
The release of this jailbreak is specifically designed to pressure Chronic Dev into not releasing the SHAtter exploit, instead implementing the limera1n exploit into greenpois0n. Now that geohot has released limera1n, releasing SHAtter would uselessly disclose another bootrom exploit to Apple.
geohot's rationale is that Apple has already discovered, through internal testing, the limera1n exploit, making it very likely that it will be fixed in the next bootrom. Because iBoot code is present both in the bootrom and firmware, and because firmware is refreshed much more often that bootrom code, any fix in this code branch would appear first in firmware. geohot observed his limera1n exploit was closed in firmware and concluded that it would almost certainly be fixed in the next bootrom revision, whereas SHAtter still has a chance of remaining useful in the 5th generation iPhone should it not be disclosed at this time.
limera1n's untethered userland exploit was obtained by geohot under questionable circumstances from comex. comex did in fact end up giving his approval for the exploit to be included in limera1n.