Permanent iPhone 4 Unlock In the Works But It Will Take a While

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The fact that the iPhone 4 is still unlockable, at least the one that comes with new basebands on board (that’s basebands 2.10.04, 3.10.01 and 4.10.01 in case you were wondering) is an important victory for Apple. While the iPhone 4 and all previous iOS devices, are jailbreakable for life thanks to that Limera1n exploit used by all jailbreak versions out there, Apple scored major points for itself and its carrier partners by managing to keep its latest phone locked after nine months since it was launched.

The hackers have been battling Apple during all this time and they have only managed to unlock iPhone 3GS units and the first iPhone 4 handsets that were sold right after the launch of the new handset. But since then we have reported countless time of the arrival of the iPhone 4 unlock but we never got a release date.

It’s now March 2011 and up until yesterday, we still didn’t have a clear image of the future of the iPhone 4 unlock. Well now we know more, and depending on whether you see the glass half full or half empty you’re going to conclude that a permanent iPhone 4 is coming soon, or that the iPhone 4 will never be unlocked.

In short it seems that the iPhone Dev Team were working in vain on a functional iPhone 4 unlock and what they did manage to do was to unlock just one device. Now they’re back to the drawing board and they’re working on a new exploit, devised by Geohot three years ago and one that could offer you a permanent unlock, just like the one a carrier would offer you. But the NCK-unlock could be rather difficult to perform by end-users, if the iPhone Dev Team manages to crack it in the first place. And that’s a big if. But here’s a full FAQ that should help you decide what to do with your new/old iPhone 4 that can’t be currently unlocked:

Since there is a lot of confusion out there, and since I’m repeating myself all the time (which I do not really like), I made this little write up of questions that are continuously being asked (my personal FAQ). Please not that this is a global explanation. Don’t try to argue with me on specific details.

1. What happened?! I thought the unlock for basebands 02.10.01 & 03.10.01 would be released within the next 2 weeks?

As you know the Dev-Team (MuscleNerd) have been working on the unlock for quite a while now. They were making great progress on the unlock, but they found out that they (accidentally) unlocked “one particular SIM card” instead of the baseband itself. Which means that the unlock would only be an unlock you could use with MuscleNerd’s T-Mobile SIM. So, useless. If the unlock would unlock the baseband instead of “the SIM”, it’d probably be out within 2 weeks (reasonable timeframe which they had hoped). But things turned out to be different. Basically these <2 weeks predictions were a lack of information.

2. What is this NCK-key cracking? How does it work?

The NCK-key is the key generated by Apple if you’d officially unlock you iPhone, and with officially I mean, via your carrier. This “NCK-unlock” method is known over a few years now, actually since geohot started working on unlocking the iPhone 2G. He developed a program that could “crack” this 15 digits long key and unique for every device. Geohots NCKBF program could do around 100,000 keys/second which would produce a hit in many years, or complete a search in 317 years. To get to a point where this is actually doable we would need many orders of magnitude of improvement. Even if you use a PS3 (would we still want to use this??) or special hardware (within 1,000 US$ range) you will only get an improvement of 20-100 times.. which doesn’t help much.

Now, luckily, with the exploits they have now, they can’t unlock your baseband, but they *can* capture more information from the baseband to speed up this cracking process. Since the NORID and CHIPID (unique for every device) are known, you’d apparently only have to check 40 more bits (5 digits). A 40 bits key is theoretically crackable on “home hardware” within a week (24/7). The downside of this approach is that you’ll have to keep your computer turned on, and your iPhone has to be connected. And that is the reason why they never tried it before. Please note that this method is completely theorical and has been NOT tried at all till this moment.

3. Now what? Should I sell my locked iPhone 4?

I’d wait for more information on this “NCK-unlock”. Right now it’s pretty vague what timeframe we’re talking about. If the Dev-Team can pull this method off, it’d be very promising for those waiting for an unlock. If this method turns out to be not doable, I’d consider selling your iPhone 4 and save up for a factory unlocked iPhone 5.

4. Do you think there is every going to be an unlock?

Of course. But that’s unlikely to be any time soon (with soon being <1 month).

5. If the NCK method fails, how long do you think it will take for the Dev-Team to unlock the iPhone 4?

No ETA at all. Could be a few weeks, but it could easily be a few months as well.

Apple must be gloating about this, again, whether they’re seeing the glass rather half full than empty. As for the permanent unlock this report suggests, well, we’re going to keep a close eye on the iPhone Dev Team and report back with more iPhone 4 unlock updates in the near future. So stick around, subscribe to our feed and follow us on Twitter to get all the iPhone 4 updates as they happen.