iPhone Dev Team working on new PWANGE Tool for iTunes 8

By Aaron Besson at 11 September, 2008, 10:16 am

Apple seems to be playing the cat and mouse again with iTunes 8. They have coded in some countermeasures to the Dev Teams PWNAGE Tool. If you try to PWN/restore your device with a custom firmware, that has not been pwned before with iTunes 8 you will get one of a few errors. The Dev Team have said that PWNAGE Tool will require a hardware upgrade to stop PWNAGE from working, and that this is meerly a speedbump in the road to freedom. Read more below:

“Countermeasures

If you’ve been following the technical aspects of our blog since July, you may have noticed that we’ve asserted multiple times that Apple can’t fix the bug we’ve exploited in PwnageTool unless they fix their hardware.

That hardware fact is still true. But one way they can try to combat Pwnage for existing hardware is to program iTunes to detect and prevent the Pwnage exploit. In fact, they’ve already done that in iTunes 8. The screenshot below from iTunes 8 using a Pwned ipsw (with an unPwned device attached) is one example.

The nice thing about iTunes decisions is that we can provide you with patches to counter them. We have one such patch already for Mac iTunes 8 for iPod touch. We’ll be working out the full suite of patches for all the combinations over the next week.

Here are 2 screenshots that Apple doesn’t want you to see. Notice the Terminal icon at the end of:

Then once we’ve launched it, despite mobiledevice’s best intentions:”