The JailbreakMe exploit was, well, nasty. It made use of an apparent flaw in how iOS handles PDF documents (this bug shouldn’t affect other PDF readers, just the iOS one, according to Sophos).
Security expert Charlie miller characterized the JailbreakMe exploit as “very beautiful work,” and said that it’s ” scary how it totally defeats apple’s [sic] security architecture.” So while jailbreakers might be disappointed to see this hack go away, for everyone else it’s probably for the best. I mean, if a security bug can jailbreak your phone, there’s no telling what else it could do.
There’s no word yet on whether or not iOS 4.0.2 un-jailbreaks your phone if you’ve already done the deed, so if you’ve jailbroken your iPhone 4 then upgraded to iOS 4.0.2 we’d love to hear from you.
Update: A couple of readers e-mailed us to tell us that the 4.0.2 update will undo the jailbreak, so if you want to keep your jailbreak with iOS 4, stick with iOS 4.0.1. But be aware that you’d be running a version with a nasty security flaw.
Update 2: Our Tony Bradley reports that a jailbreak hack developer released a patch for this hole for iOS 4.0.1 users. We haven’t tested whether or not the jailbreak patch really fixes the hole, so use a your own risk. If you’ve installed the jailbreak patch, leave a comment below and tell us whether or not it works.
For more details, see the iOS 4.0.2 and iOS 3.2.2 pages on Apple’s support site.
[via Daring Fireball]
More on iPhone Jailbreaking from PCWorld’s GeekTech blog!
- Retailers Try, Fail to Prevent In-Store Jailbreaking
- The Web-Based iOS Jailbreak Tool- How Does It Work?
- Unlock Your iPhone 4! Dev-Team Releases Ultrasn0w for iPhone 4
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