Monday, July 16, 2007

Unlocking the iPhone Could be Impossible

Unlike mobile phones made by traditional GSM handset manufactures such as Motorola and Nokia, the iPhone could prove to be very difficult or virtually impossible to unlock from AT&T's network.

My thinking is that Apple designed the current iPhone model to work specifically (and only) with AT&T Mobility (formerly Cingular). Other handset manufactures generally design a handset to work on any GSM network - after all GSM is a global standard - then they put in a software lock which can be unlocked with a code.

What if Apple put a digitally signed hardware lock into the iPhone's ROM?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yeah right. And the DVD encription was impossible to crack as well as the enygma machine. It's a matter of time.

Anonymous said...

The Enigma machine was never cracked. The Allies managed to capture one and thus the code was broken using the machine. The code was never actually broken.

DVD encryption is different to hardware encryption as software is required to read the DVD. This is not the case for GSM as it's all handled by hardware then the resultant signal is passed to the software allowing it to communicate.

Also with NO access to the Kernel on the iPhone it makes it extremely difficult to hack the iPhone. A great read about this is over at Roughly Drafted:

iPhone OS X Architecture: Disk, Shell, and Password Security

Of course that's not to say it can't be done, I just think it's going to be way more difficult to crack the iPhone than it ever was to crack DVDs.