Spire Siri Port for Jailbroken iOS 5 Devices Available, Legal Too

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Just yesterday we mentioned a new Siri project meant to bring the virtual assistant legally to the iPhone 4 and the iPod touch 4G, i4Siri, and now we hear that a public Siri port, which also happens to be a legal one, has been released via Cydia.

However that’s not necessarily good news since certain conditions have to be met to install it. The port, called Spire, was created by developer Chpwn and Ryan Petrich and there are various things to consider before trying it out.

Spire works with the iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPod touch 4G, iPod touch 3G and iPad, but only if the devices are jailbroken beforehand. Spire can be downloaded via Cydia, and measures 100MB, so make sure you have decent Wi-Fi coverage before getting it. Spire itself is a small port, but users will also download Siri when getting it, which explains the hefty download.

Unfortunately Spire will not be available to most of you since not everyone has access to an iPhone 4S. That’s right, the port is not a complete solution and still requires users to own or have access to an iPhone 4S to extract certain information off it:

However, Spire is not a complete solution. Apple still requires authorization to use Siri, so information from an iPhone 4S is still required. To insert this information, Spire allows you to enter your own proxy server address. I’ve put up a list of my ideas on how you might get access to a proxy; hopefully you can figure something out.

How are these devices authorized? Chpwn explains:

The authentication is based on what I’m going to call “tokens”, which are signed by Apple. If I remember correctly (I haven’t looked at this for a month or so, and this is from memory), Siri (through the assistantd binary) first asks Apple for certificate data. This is then used to sign a blob of data generated by the iPhone and encrypted using AES. That signed data is then sent back to Apple, processed. If that was found to be valid, the device receives the “token” (called sessionInfo in the code) and an expiration date (the token is generally renewed daily).

So that means that if you have an iPhone 4S and want to extract the necessary data from it to enable Siri via Spire on your other iOS devices, that can be done. Otherwise you’ll have to wait for a different Siri port to become available.

We’ll return with more news on porting Siri to other iOS devices, but in the mean time don’t forget that whatever you put your devices through is your responsibility and yours alone. We’ll never advise you to go forward with such plans while we inform you on the latest progress on such tools.