Siri: iOS 5.0.1 Minor Update Makes Siri Ports Legally Possible for Older iOS Devices

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Siri has been said to be one of the iPhone 4S’ main selling points, and Apple is closely guarding the speech-powered personal assistant, to prevent unauthorized use on other devices. Previous efforts to port Siri to non iPhone 4S devices proved to be impractical and illegal, but a recent update to iOS might just let developers hack Siri without any legal repercussions.

To date, all hacks and ports of Siri requires several things. First, a smartphone — say, the iPhone 4 — can use a proxy server to act as the speech-recognition server. Second, the smartphone may spoof an iPhone 4S’ unique device identifier. However, these are all insecure and not viable for wide distribution due to certain issues. For one, Apple can easily detect whether thousands of devices are using a single device ID. Also, accessing data via a third-party server opens one’s device to being hacked.

But the latest update to iOS might just prove to be the solution that hackers are looking for. A minor update released for the iPhone 4S allows for wide-open access to the data previously unavailable. With an unencrypted ramdisk, it’s now possible to extract system files necessary to do a Siri port for other iOS devices without infringing on Apple copyright. According to a developer who goes by the handle MuscleNerd, “it’s the first public 4S ipsw where the main filesystem keys are obtainable (due to non-encrypted ramdisks).”

Now this might just be a glitch, or Apple’s engineers may have forgotten to encrypt this portion of the iPhone 4S firmware.  Apple’s upcoming 5.1 update to iOS is expected soon, and the company might start encrypting this area of iOS 5 anew. But until then, users of the iPhone 4, 3GS, iPod Touch 4th generation and iPad may soon be able to use several working ports of Siri — until Apple gets to the bottom of things, perhaps.