Tuaw.com: "iPhone Dev Team" issues statement

A spokesman for the iPhone Dev Team, the group that developed the iPhone unlock has issued a statement condemning Apple and promising a tool in the next week which will restore your iPhone to a factory-fresh state. The unlock, he writes, made the iPhone free and useful world-wide, not just in certain countries. The text of the statement, with modifications for grammar and spelling, follows after the break.

9/25 Statement from the iPhone unlockers

Based on download numbers, the iPhone Dev Team believes that, worldwide, several hundred thousand people have unlocked their iPhones. That number continues growing every day. The removal of the lock, a bug, was a major step forward in the iPhone development. It made the iPhone free and useful to anyone, not only to those in certain countries.

Apple now announces that the next firmware update, expected later this week, will possibly break the handset of all of us free users in the World. It speaks of "damage" done to the firmware and "unauthorized access" to our own property, The removal of those firmware problems, which were built in in favor for AT&T, does not cause "damage" as they want to make us believe.

We will provide you with a tool in the next week which will be able to recover your nck counter and seczones and even enables you to restore your phone to a Factory-like state.

In the meantime we advise you not to update your free iPhone with the upcoming firmware (1.1.1). Wait for the next version to be fixed to work properly with your carrier and not break your phone.

Q&A from Gizmodo.com:

Does unlocking software cause "irreparable damage" to the iPhone?

No, it doesn't. The only thing that the anySim software does is modify part of the firmware so it's not limited to use only AT&T SIM cards. Modify is not "damaging." It just means that specific values in the seczone have been replaced by others. Technically, according to the Dev Team:

"It modifies the firmware to accept any given nck to open the phone for any carrier. This causes the phone to write a bogus values into the seczone as an unlock token."

This means that values can be written and changed back to their original state easily, just as easily as they were originally changed to allow the unlock.

Could Apple have been able to upgrade iPhones without the likely possibility of bricking the iPhone? (According to Apple, their firmware will likely and "permanently" make the device "inoperable.")

Yes, it could have been done. As someone in the Dev Team core puts it:

"Apple has multiple ways of upgrading the [firmware of the] baseband [radio chip] without committing a 500,000-phone massacre.
First, they can issue a secpack [security pack] for everything in the firmware. They could simply issue one of these to restore the value if a regular token is not detected, thus rewriting this part to its original state. This process would most likely defeat any unlock available, Dev Team or iPhone Sim Free, without bricking the iPhone in any way.

New firmware updates could also employ new firmware which closes the loophole that allows the use of a secpack for other operations. They could make this method of updating even resistant to tampering or abuse for a unlock. The possibilities are there."

So yes, as you can see, Apple could do the described operation, changing the values back to its original state then forcing a restore to factory of the whole firmware.

Is the total bricking a real possibility?

It's not clear if Apple will finally brick or not the iPhone in the next update. Or what they mean with "permanently inoperable." The Dev Team speculates that "it won't be a true bricking at all. The firmware would probably roll back to a default state similar to its state after manufacturing. This state is indicated by a lost IMEI number, which results in the iPhone being unusable with any network."

In fact, this is what you will get if you flash a retail firmware in any phone that has been previously updated.

But is this problem permanent?

No, it's not. The problem is not permanent and can be reverted, as the Dev Team points out:

"Currently this state is easy to fix, but future [hardware] updates will just close the flashing flaw and let you alone with your factory-like phone."

After the bricking, can Apple provide a way to revert iPhones to factory status and re-lock iPhones, patching them so the current unlock solution can't be applied?

Yes, definitely. See above. If the iPhone Dev Team hackers can do it, working with no documentation, Apple engineers can do exactly the same.

Will the iPhone Dev Team revert the iPhone to its original state

Yes, they have said before they are working on this and they have code already written to do so.

This code, however, won't unlock the iPhone again, it'll just revert it to factory state. New unlocking software may come soon thereafter. There's more information on this, but we can't use it in this article yet.