Remember that cool video we showed you a while back that had an iPhone getting “pwned” by and iTunes-installed firmware? The clever iPhone hackers out there showed off how to make your iTunes application install a pre-jailbroken firmware onto your iPhone. Now, the iPhone Dev Team has released their iPhone PwnageTool Application that puts the power of pre-jailbroken firmwares in your hand.
PwnageTool basically allows an iPhone developer to put together their own, customized iPhone .ipsw firmware bundle. By exploiting a fundamental hole in the iPhone firmware loading process, PwnageTool forces iTunes to ignore firmware integrity checks. That means iPhone firmwares can be jailbroken and bundled with unsigned (unofficial) third-party applications – so you don’t have to do the iPhone jailbreak ho-down to get those fun applications onto your iPhone. The PwnageTool also opens up the possibility of getting Linux OS on the iPhone. Pwnage allows any unsigned firmware to be installed to the iPhone (using iTunes, of course), and an iPhone .ipsw package loaded with a Linux OS is already in the works by the iPhone Dev Team.
The iPhone Dev Team believes the PwnageTool will resist any changes from Apple and comes with BootNeutr, iPwner, and the IPSW Builder application. BootNeutr gives iPhone hackers complete control over the baseband (baseband unlocking, custom baseband loading, etc.). iPwner allows the custom iPhone firmwares to be loaded onto the iPhone. IPSW Builder gives the user the necessary tools to create the custom firmware.
The PwnageTool is available on Mac only for now. A windows version is in the final stages of testing and should be available soon. Grab PwnageTool for Mac here.
Of course, it takes some know-how to put together your own custom iPhone firmware. For the more novice users out there, it might be best to stick with iNdependence or ZiPhone.
Here’s a video of an iPhone getting “pwned.”