IPhone 3GS iBEC and IBSS Extraction

From SifWiki

Introduction

There's much talk at the moment of the new security features which have been put in place on the iPhone 3GS to try and foil future Jailbreak/Unlock attempts. As of the writing of this HowTo the iPhone Dev Teams latest website post is pointing us to run a process to store a couple of files safely in order that future unlocks are safeguarded, here's how I went about it.

Process

• Read fully the DevTeams post at http://blog.iphone-dev.org/post/133799347/your-3gs-temporary-solution
• Connect the iPhone to iTunes and do a full sync (and therefore backup of all your data)
• Put your iPhone 3GS running 3.0 into DFU mode by following these instructions; http://www.iclarified.com/entry/index.php?enid=1034
• Open up a terminal window /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app and follow the commands below.
• If you have root access to your Mac already, then become root with `su -`, if you haven't then you'll need to set a root password;

fozzie:~ siftah$ sudo passwd root
Password:
Changing password for root.
New password:
Retype new password:

• Now become root, if you haven't already.

su -

• Create a directory to use for saving the files from the /tmp directory

fozzie:~ siftah$ mkdir /Users/siftah/Desktop/iPhoneBackup

• In order to grab everything that gets spat out into the /tmp dir I used the following trick;

fozzie:~ siftah$ while true; do rsync -av /private/tmp /Users/siftah/Desktop/iPhoneBackup ; done

This will put rsync running in a really tight loop which will grab everything that gets written to the /tmp dir, depending on the speed of your machine this could be a bit nasty and you'll maybe want to add a `sleep 1` into the loop to slow it down a little.

fozzie:~ siftah$ while true; do rsync -av /private/tmp /Users/siftah/Desktop/iPhoneBackup ; sleep 1 ; done

• Now with the phone in DFU mode plug it into the USB cable and iTunes should fire up and tell you it's seeing an iPhone in DFU/Restore mode. Let it do a full restore to 3.0, at the end you should have a variety of files in your backup directory, the two you're looking for are called iBEC.n88ap.RELEASE.dfu and iBSS.n88ap.RELEASE.dfu.

fozzie:iPhoneBackup siftah$ ls -alhR PersonalizedRestoreBundle.* |grep RELEASE.dfu
-rw-------  1 siftah  wheel   102K  3 Jul 17:55 iBEC.n88ap.RELEASE.dfu
-rw-------  1 siftah  wheel   102K  3 Jul 17:55 iBSS.n88ap.RELEASE.dfu
-rw-------  1 siftah  wheel   102K  3 Jul 17:56 iBEC.n88ap.RELEASE.dfu

As you can see, I had 3 but this is probably because I did the process more than once (?).

• You'll probably now want to run a sync to put all your content back on the phone.

Hope that helps someone! :)