Hacking the iPhone: iPhone Dev Wiki Progress report

The iPhone Dev Wiki team has been making steady progress in their goal of achieving freedom from AT&T. They had told us earlier in the week that they have a new way to search for the key to achieve their objective when they reverse engineered the software that controlled the iPhone's radio communications. Today, they have announced further breakthrough as they have extracted the full content of the radio memory.

Here is how it is all supposed to work: iPhone's radio communications is handled by an ARM-based chip (Infineon S-Gold2) which also control's the iPhone's multimedia features. As you would expect its low level functions are handled by an Operating system which for the ARM-based chip is the Nucleus Real Time Operating System (referred to as Nucleus OS going forward).

So the genius iPhone hackers are of the opinion that one of the ways to break in, to access or disable the lock from within the system is through this operating system and hence reverse engineering and documenting the Nucleus OS earlier in the week was one of the major achievements for the hacking community.

But this in no way has simplified the road the freedom especially since the iPhone has two layers that need to be explored, the first is the one running in the main CPU, i.e. MAC OS X and the second is the Nucleus OS running on a secondary chip.

Based on today's announcement, by extracting the full content of the radio memory the hackers have achieved another milestone. The idea here is to release the extracted binary to the world to enable everyone else to work towards unlocking the iPhone as in this particular case "too many cooks spoil the broth" does not apply, in fact the more apt phrase is "more the merrier".

However, they plan to release the source code / binary as soon as they think it is mature enough as they need to be careful here since the binary might contain personal information and copyrighted code. They have however released a tool to get your own memory dump called NORDumper.tar.bz2.

If you are a programming guru and think you can help out, please do join the action @  iPhone IRC channel or help them monetarily with a donation as they would be happy with whatever support possible. If you are interested the link for steps to use and download the tool is available on iPhone Dev Wiki website.

PS: Link to iPhone Dev Wiki has not been provided based on their request as you shouldn't have a problem finding them using Google.

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