I Had a Hacking Weekend - Cracking Open the iPhone
by Ewan Spence
Lo, the iPhone is here, and I’ve spent a delightful weekend tracking the progress of a few groups of people in the shadows. The groups who are hard at work not with Coverflow, mutli-touch screens or even seeing just how average the camera is. No I’ve been watching the hackers sifting through log files, hex dumps and output code so they can find out what really makes the iPhone tick.
I spoke to one of the team behind the reverse engineering project currently under way on the web and managed through IRC (which even in the face of Second Life, graphical chat-rooms and voip is still thriving as a messaging community). He’s also the admin of www.hackint0sh.org, and has managed to run OS X on the Apple TV boxes, and created the 1048 kernel of OS X86, so the pedigree is not in doubt. The goal on the iPhone is “to have a good look around the new ARM powered OS X†and to “explore the interior†with the hope of being able to run their own code on the device.
Of course this also means that areas such as the ‘unlocking of the device’ away from the AT&T Only mode that it is in now will also be discovered, and no doubt made public and exploited in short order. That has commercial implications for both the network and Apple. Once the iPhone can run on any network and lets be honest that’s not going to be too far into the future) then it’s all going to come down to the cost of breaking the AT&T contract compared to the two year running costs.
Actually, maybe not even that. Conceivably you could purchase your iPhone from an Apple store, and not even activate it on AT&T, just walk away to another network, pop in a SIM, and away you go. Which is, in my opinion, great for the consumer (and something encouraged in Europe) but something that the five year exclusive deal would frown on. I’m sure the lawyers in the US will talk about this process breaking the DMCA, but with most of the team I spoke to being based outside the US (and trusting their iPhone’s to arrive via FedEx) the DMCA will not apply to them.
So this is an interesting quandary for Apple and AT&T. If the iPhone had been open to third party developers from the start, all these creative energies would be being put to much flashier use, to the benefit of Apple and the iPhone. As it stands, through the interesting business decisions made at Cupertino, the work is on cracking the iPhone to get that functionality – and in the process crack open the barriers to unlocked iPhones, out of contract devices, root passwords to the OS and the spectre of much more malicious programs accessing the root functions. For sure these would have come along in due course, but to actively ensure that the community will start to work on these as soon as possible could be a bad judgment call from Apple.
