iOS 5 Untethered Jailbreak: Crash Reporter Helped Receive Over 10Mn Reports, How Optimistic We Should be?

Following Apple's significant move of finding and patching up the jailbreak-prone exploits in iOS 5 betas, the hacking collective Chronic Dev Team rolled out the Chronic-Dev Crash Reporter last week as part of its master plan.

The reporter tool prevents your computer from sending crash reports present on your iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad to Apple. The tool then copies all the crash reports off the device and sends them to a secure, private server hosted by the Chronic Dev Team.

The Chronic Dev Team wants the crash reports to find vulnerabilities in the process fails that may lead to an untethered jailbreak for the iOS 5.

Using this agglomeration of your crash reports and our ninja skills, Chronic Dev will be able to quickly pinpoint vulnerabilities in various programs by using the same techniques Apple currently employs, Joshua Hill aka p0sixninja wrote on a blog post.

On Saturday, p0sixninja took to his Twitter page and said that the Chronic Dev Team has received over 10 million crash reports, 10,071,868 to be exact, in just six days. If the number is to be believed, it just reveals how passionate people are about jailbreaking their iOS devices.

Now, the question is how the Chronic Dev Team will go through more than 10 million crash reports? p0sixninja provides the answer for that as well. MapReduce (the same technology google uses) should allow us to run tests that would take days normally in only seconds, he tweeted.

Introduced by Google in 2004, MapReduce allows users to rapidly process huge amounts of data in parallel on large data sets on clusters of computers. The software is inspired by the map and reduce functions commonly used in functional programming.

Another Prominent Jailbreaker Thinks Differently

Stefan Esser aka i0n1c, the hacker behind many popular jailbreaks including iOS 4.3.1 untethered jailbreak and one of the main authors of the book iOS Hacker's Handbook, has recently shared his view on the Chronic-Dev Crash Reporter tool.

According to him, simply looking at random dumps without knowing what triggered the crash is a waste of time. With only a crash report, you cannot reproduce the crash as such, he said.

I don't want to sound tooo (too) pessimistic. But I believe collecting crash dumps from iPhone users will not help finding exploits, i0n1c tweeted.

The hacker said Apple has patched many weaknesses in the iOS 5 firmware, a reason for which p0sixninja couldn't take advantage of the five userland exploits he had discovered.

The more I look into iOS 5 I must say that many of the weaknesses (not vulnerabilities) that were exploited by previous exploits are gone, i0n1c tweeted.

One thing quite evident from i0n1c's comments is that performing jailbreaks is becoming increasingly harder these days. However, it is too early to say that the Chronic-Dev Crash Reporter tool is of no use.

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