iDongle: Hardware Jailbreak
Renaud, a young French electronics engineer, acquired a locked iPhone 3Gs for $ 600. As it turned out, the iPhone had a new bootrom, which means that, like the 3rd generation iPod Touch, only tethered jailbreak was possible. In fact, you use the phone, but after rebooting it turns into a brick Having all the necessary knowledge, the guy decided to build a hardware jailbreak, i.e. roughly speaking, a small microcontroller that will act as a USB host, and when connected to an iPhone / iPod, will initiate a jailbreak procedure using the usb_control_msg (0x21, 2) exploit for iBoot.
The idea is not new and it occurred to many, but the talented geek even realized it!
To begin with, Renaud reversed blackra1n and made jailbreak work on a regular developer platform with Embedded Linux on board.
Then armed with his favorite CAD program, the guy designed a specialized board with the working name iDongle.
The only thing left was to develop a prototype, which was done. At the moment, the prototype has a size of 30x60 mm and uses a huge 9 V battery for power.
Proof of concept:
At the moment, Renaud is collecting donations in order to order the first "large" batch of devices of 50 pieces: www.myboyfriendisageek.com/2010/hack/on-tube
Upd: I reloaded the pictures, since the hosting of the electronics engineer died the brave under the onslaught of the Habraeffect.