Three years of pwnage(tool)

Three years ago (almost to the day!), the first version of PwnageTool was released for firmware 1.1.4.  So today we’re excited to release another edition of both PwnageTool and redsn0w to bring an untethered jailbreak for Apple’s latest firmware, FW 4.3.1.

he 4.3.1 untether exploit comes courtesy of Stefan Esser , a security researcher based in Germany.  Stefan has a long history of vulnerability research, and ironically his first contribution to the iPhone jailbreak community was improved security — last year he beat Apple to the punch and implemented ASLR for jailbroken iPhones with his “antid0te” framework. We’re happy to see that Stefan then turned his iPhone attention over to an untethered jailbreak exploit!

The 4.3.1 untether works on all devices that actually support 4.3.1 except for the iPad2:

• iPhone3GS
• iPhone4 (GSM)
• iPod touch 3G
• iPod touch 4G
• iPad1
• AppleTV 2G (PwnageTool only for now)

The reason the untether won’t work as-is on the iPad2 is that it requires a bootrom or iBoot-level exploit to install, and the iPad2 is not susceptible to either the limera1n or SHAtter bootrom exploits.

or everyone else, redsn0w is the easier program to use (and redsn0w runs on both Mac and Windows).  Please check out places like iClarified for some excellent guides on how to use both PwnageTool and redsn0w.

redsn0w 0.9.6rc11 (updated to rc11..details in Update #1 below):

PwnageTool Official Download Link




Update #1:

Those running redsn0w may have noticed we enabled too many Settings options in some versions of the jailbreak (for instance, what you want your side switch to do, even if you have no side switch because you’re not using an iPad).   Release rc10 of redsn0w corrects that (you can just run it over your existing jailbreak…be sure to de-select Cydia to avoid package conflicts).
Along the way, we’ve also added the option to enable boot animations…these animations can be installed via Cydia, but be sure to select which animation to use via the Settings->Bootlogo setting after you’ve downloaded an animation (and again, you can just run rc10 rc11 over your existing jailbreak…be sure to de-select Cydia to avoid package conflicts).
(The boot animation we tested against was “Android Boot Logo”.  It correctly installs all the dependencies needed to run the animation at each boot).