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iPhone Proving Tough Nut To Crack |
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Written by Adam Gosling
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Thursday, 19 July 2007 |
News today that after nearly a month hard cracking, the global team
effort to dismantle security protection locking the new Apple iPhone to
the unpopular Cingular/AT&T mobile phone network is only making
slow progress is a testament to how hard Apple has worked to tie up its
latest device.
Key to the device's marketing strategy is to limit the availability to
just one carrier per country. That way APple can get healthy kick-backs
from carriers who so far have apparently been willing to engage in an
Auction to secure rights to provide the network service for the new
phone.
Such is the iPhone's demand pull carriers, AT&T in the U.S., stand
to gain significant subscriber numbers by forcing new iPhone owners to
sign up for 24 month contracts in order to use their new handset.
As you can imagine, the reaction to such restrictions has been for the
hacker community to pull out all the stops in a world-wide effort to
crack the device's activation security mechanisms so the phone can be
used with any SIM card.
That's proved a little tougher than you might expect. Usually the
hackers make short work of just about any scheme the hardware vendors
can come up with. But the key to the iPhone's success in so far keeping
the 'bad guys' out has been a unique blend of hardware and software
checks working in unison to tie up the iPhone's activation programs
tighter than a Steve Jobs turtleneck.
As mobilised understands it from reading this report
on another website the activation lock devised by Apple is due to the
fact that the firmware on the handset's radio chipset which crosschecks
the country code and
network operator code against the first six digits of the SIM card you
insert in the thing.
That means if you pop in another SIM, the phone checks to see if it is
a AT&T SIM and will just refuse to work. The easy way around this
is to hack and replace the firmware with code that is more willing to
accept non-AT&T SIMs, right?
Trouble here, it turns out is that the firmware is digitally signed,
meaning the damn thing won't even turn on if the new firmware isn't signed
identically.
It's a small hole, but one that's been exploited. The news today is
that the community working on a crack (at iPhone Dev Wiki)
have put together a Mac-based program with at least allows you to use
other AT&T SIM cards in the phone. Presumably because they have the
same Country and Network codes as the SIMS intended for the iPhone.
What the program, called iASign, will allow you to do is use pre-paid
cards or any existing AT&T accounts (like your work account) to
make calls without having to commit to a new two-year contract with
AT&T.
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