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This author is basing their reasoning on some fundamental flaws: 1) That the chip needs to be physically removed to be reflashed, introducing significant down
by a2tech 11y ago
This author is basing their reasoning on some fundamental flaws:
1) That the chip needs to be physically removed to be reflashed, introducing significant down time
2) That the iPhone is incapable of rebooting hundreds of thousands of times
To reflash the chip they'll talk to it directly over the bus on the logic board-either by soldering in a test harness or by building a rig that touches pins/test points on the board. Very likely this rig will be connected to the battery as well to enable quick reboots. The addition of a camera pointed at the screen would enable the cracking software to watch the process.
The idea that the phone would care about the number of reboots is just odd-I don't know why this would even enter his mind as something to be concerned with.
- guan 11y agoThis was exactly my thought. You would build a small circuit board with contacts on the bottom corresponding to the footprint of the NAND flash chip. On top of the board would be either a flash chip that is denser than the original flash, along with some circuitry that allows you to electrically disconnect it from the phone and reprogram it externally, or a high speed serial interface with a cable connecting the board to an external device—such as an FPGA connected to enough DRAM to have an image of the entire flash—that lets you emulate the NAND flash.
- Sean1708 11y ago1: > Presumably, you can make this more efficient by pipelining the process, using multiple sets of flash chips, so that a new fresh set can be swapped in within a few seconds, but it still takes a couple minutes for the iPhone to reboot. 2: > Can an iPhone even reboot 100,000 times? Nobody knows. The author seems to be well aware of both of those points. Besides they're not saying that it can't work, just that they don't know for certain that it will work.