Apple TV hacker and developer nitoTV has recently shared some thoughts on the Apple TV 2 5.0 (iOS 5.1) and Apple TV 3 jailbreak. According to him, without an A5 bootrom exploit being found, an Apple TV 3 jailbreak “will be an uphill battle.” That’s mainly because the “attack surface” on Apple TV is much smaller:
There is no built in default web browser, there are less services running, with no web browser and less services running there are fewer places to smoke/fuzz out a vulnerability. For instance, even if the AppleTV 3 was out before the iPad 2 and 4S were jailbroken with absinthe, it would not have been applicable, no mobilebackup to exploit for part of the injection vector.
However, nitoTV is not saying the Apple TV 3 jailbreak is hopeless, it may just take a (long) while until the jailbreak is out.
Apple TV 2 5.1 jailbreak
nitoTV has also shared some news on the status of the jailbreak for Apple TV 2 running the latest software version: as of right now the jailbreak for 5.1 on the Apple TV is limited to a tethered jailbreak (not public yet), nitoTV works about 95%, XBMC is broken and “there is still work to be done, there are some bugs to sort out.” But, as the hacker admits, the tethered jailbreak is only part of the problem:
Right now we are still busily sorting out legacy and compatibility issues to make sure all roads still go through beigelist when loading third party appliances. I’m not certain how long it will take to merge the differences between beigelist and espresso, hopefully, not much longer.
Well, as they say, everything comes to him who waits… and, as far as we are aware, the waiting may be over soon!
Remember that if you have updated to 5.0 but you have the SHSH blobs saved for 4.4.4, you can easily downgrade to older firmware using FireCore’s Seas0nPass.
[image: nitoTV]
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