Apple will prevent SHSH based iOS downgrades?

iPhone Dev Team is worried that Apple is trying to develop a way to prevent iOS firmware downgrading by using SHSH blobs. SHSH blobs are saved on Cydia servers if you chose to do so when you jailbreak your device. Alternatively you can use TinyUmbrella or some similar tool to save SHSH blobs. You can read more on how and why to save SHSH blobs in our blog archive. Developers from iPhone Dev Team think that this is connected with the new over the air upgrades changes in iOS, but this isn’t something cheerful for iPhone jailbreak users.

This problem will trouble only users who decide to upgrade to iOS 5 and only after Apple decides to use this approach. As you probably know iOS 5 is currently available for developers only. Nobody knows will Dev Team jailbreak developers or some other jailbreak group be able to solve this problem, and even if they find a way they probably wont reveal it at least until iOS 5 becomes officially released.

It is actually hard to say is Apple’s primary goal to stop jailbreaking and downgrading iOS devices or is this an completely unrelated software update. Despite being critical of jailbreaking and unlocking, Apple has often made good use of jailbreak developers and their hacks, as it often exploited jailbreaking community as its free R&D and testing ground for various iOS updates. Many features that were at the beginning available only for jailbroken devices were later integrated into official iOS releases.

Also many exploits were not patched in earlier iOS versions, leading some people to think Apple is unofficially leaving some open security holes to be found and eventually used by jailbreak developers. Probably nobody knows for sure the whole story except Steve Jobs and his closest team members. It remains to be seen will Apple really close this exploit, how will jailbreak developers react to this, and what will Apple do if jailbreak devs find a solution for this move?

Seems that we will have some interesting time ahead. We can only cheer and hope that our friendly jailbreak developers will be able to work around any problem Apple presents to them.

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