The cat and mouse game between the engineers at Apple and the people that provide us with jailbreaks is turning into more of a war than a game. For as long as I can remember, the production of a jailbreak for new devices and firmwares has always had stumbling blocks, but rarely has it thrown as many obstacles in the way as the current pursuit of the A5 jailbreak. We are only eight weeks away from the the iPad 2’s first birthday, and in that time we have only seen an untethered jailbreak possible on iOS 4.3.3 using JailbreakMe 3.0.
Whether or not we will ever see a jailbreak as beautiful as Comex’s JailbreakMe remains to be seen. The simplicity and ease of use of the Safari based liberation removed all of the technical difficulties that some users experience during a jailbreak and opened up the world of jailbreaking to people who had never before considered it. By exploiting a parser security flaw in certain versions of iOS, Comex was able to force Safari to render a PDF then take advantage of a kernel flaw in order to inject the untethered files.
It has now been just over eight weeks since French developer Pod2g revealed that he had found a bug which he believed could be exploited to produce a jailbreak for devs running iOS 5. His theories were obviously correct, with the immediate work beginning allowing the community to benefit from an iOS 5.0.1 untethered jailbreak for all devices running Apple’s A4 processor. This jailbreak is referred to as ‘Corona’ and has been integrated into the Redsn0w tool by the iPhone Dev Team, or is available as a Cydia download for users who are already running a tethered jailbreak.
Unfortunately, the production of a jailbreak for the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 was not possible, due to various reasons. Achieving an untethered jailbreak on the A5 devices is technically possible, this is evident by the fact that Pod2g himself as an untethered 4S test device. The problem is however, that the method used to achieve that untethered status requires the use of an official Apple developer account, therefore making it impossible to legally distribute the jailbreak.
One of the beautiful things about the jailbreak community is that in times of need, unity is achieved. Separate teams exist, all trying to achieve the same goal, but all wanting to get there first. However, in this instance the most experienced and knowledgeable hackers and developers have come together in one final push past the finishing line. If the latest blog post by Pod2g, and last night’s Tweet from PlanetBeing is anything to go by then we should hopefully have some evidence of that elusive A5 jailbreak very soon.
The promising words that every user wanted to hear from Pod2g’s official blog:
@planetbeing escaped from the sandbox with the help of @saurik. Thanks to their awesome work, there should be nothing left blocking for the A5 jailbreak.
Without giving any precise estimated time of arrival, the French developer estimates that it could be a matter of days until release.
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