iPhone 3G[s] – YES, the 3G[s] – has been jailbroken on OS4.0b4 – and almost unlocked too!

Extremely recently, a hacker by the name of Kaatje has managed to find a way to jailbreak her iPhone 3G[s], but here’s the interesting part – she managed to do it WITHOUT updating her 05.11.12 baseband!  This is a huge success, because as we all know, one of the major problems of upgrading to a beta (up until this point) has been the loss of an unlock, therefore negating that option for many jailbroken iPhone users who want to upgrade.  While most people may not understand the process, this is huge news in the fact that Kaatje may have very well discovered a way to upgrade your 3G[s] while at the same time jailbreaking it as well via the usage of a custom firmware build which she manipulated PwnageTool to run.  Here is what she had to say about the processes that she used.

“I accomplished this by patching asr, lockdownd, LLB, iBEC, IBSS, iBoot, kernelcache, MobileSafari, Services.plist, and fstab. The binaries were patched with IDA Pro and OxED and were then diffed against the original pwned files with bsdiff to create patch files. I then took the diff files and built a firmware bundle that I dropped into Pwnagetool and updated the cydia tree within Pwnagetool as well. Once this was done, I created a custom ipsw with Pwnagetool, unzipped it, applied a pwned LLB from a pwnagetool generated 3.1.3 ipsw, zipped it back up and restored to my device.”

And in further comments, she also had this to say:

“This is a work in progress but I thought I would share the results so far. Cydia still has some issues, many applications install but crash, some examples include mobileterminal, sbsettings, five icon dock.”

All I can say is that I hope the iPhone dev-team can find a way to make room for this brilliant mind, because I think that through her experimentation, she can be extremely useful to the jailbreaking community.

I truly cannot wait to see how long it is going to take the iPhone HD/G4 to be jailbroken and unlocked, as well as all current models of the 2G/3G/and 3G[s]. I can honestly tell you that the anticipation is killing me.