Less than three weeks after releasing a new jailbreak for iPhones running iOS 5.01, a team of researchers has now published a similar tool for jailbreaking the iPhone 4S and iPad2. The Absinthe jailbreak tool will allow users to run unsigned code on their devices and load apps from places other than the iTunes App Store.
The untethered jailbreak tool was released Friday by a team of researchers that includes pod2g, the Chronic Dev Team and the iPhone Dev Team. The tool includes a GUI that will run on a Mac or Windows machine and will guide users through the process of installing it and rebooting their devices. There also is a command line tool integrated with the Absinthe installer.
“A tool named Absinthe and developed by the Chronic Dev Team will install the untether on your device. Also the iPhone Dev Team will release a CLI (command line) tool to help diagnose issues and repair things if it goes wrong,” pod2g wrote in a blog post about the new jailbreak.
“This is a little scary I know, but the chance you break something is really small, since we made lots of tests to verify the process on different devices. But it is the first time we use the backup/restore functions of iTunes to install software, and there are maybe things we are not aware of.”
The new jailbreak also works on the iPad2, which, like the iPhone 4S, is built using the A5 chip. The original Corona jailbreak tool that pod2g released earlier this month used two separate exploits, one in the iOS kernel and one in a binary.
“iPhone Dev have also incorporated the exact same flow into an alternative command-line interface (CLI). This will allow us to help users through individual steps of the jailbreak manually, to both help the user and help improve the overall flow. Although the CLI will also allow the user to perform the entire jailbreak from beginning to end, we anticipate it will be more useful in debugging the occasional errors. The CLI currently has over 20 individual options (in addition to the single “jailbreak” option) that should be useful during debug after the GUI release,” the iPhone Dev Team said in a blog post.
