Reverse Engineering Unlocks iPhone

The iPhone can now be used with other carriers? Well that's what the iPhone Development Team did. They reverse-engineered the software which controls the iPhone's radio communications, therefore, allowing it to be used with other providers.

The team explained that the iPhone's radio communications are handled by the Infineon S-Gold2, an ARM-based chip which also controls the iPhone's multimedia abilities. Its low-level functions are handled by the Nucleus Real Time Operating System which, according to iPhone Dev rebel forces, is one of the fronts that could give them a chance to try to "access or disable the lock from within the system." By reverse engineering and documenting Nucleus, hackers have reached another milestone towards freeing the phone from the AT&T network. From here, one of their objectives is to be able to manipulate the baseband's memory, so they can also change communication parameters.

Unlocking the iPhone is not going to be an easy task. This work also shows that the iPhone has two layers now that need to be explored to achieve the total unlocking. First, the one running in the main CPU, the main operating system (Mac OS X). Second, Nucleus running on a secondary chip controlling the access to the baseband's memory. In other words: two doors, two locks, but also one more front to crack until this Pandora's Box is opened.