Don’t get so excited ! He isn’t jailbreaking iOS devices. According to a new report from AndroidBeat, Geohot was able to gain root access to carrier variants of the Galaxy S5 and also the Note 3, Nexus 5 and possibly all other Android devices with a kernel build date of below June 3 via his ‘towel root’ exploit. The root exploit is scheduled to be released to the public at 10AM PDT on 15/6/14.
As AndroidBeat points out, KNOX, Samsung’s enterprise mobile security solution, has made it difficult to root Samsung devices released in the last one year or so.
While rooting them is possible, it will end up triggering the KNOX hardware switch, which effectively voids the warranty of the device. Since this is a hardware level switch, there is no way to reverse this process or fix it later on.
Worse, carriers in the United States lock down the bootloader on their devices, which makes it near impossible for developers to unlock the device.
Developers usually try to find an exploit via which they can gain root access on such Samsung devices, but with time, Android OEMs have patched most of them and finding new ones is an incredibly tough job. The AT&T and Verizon variant of the Galaxy S5 are a perfect example for this case and have a staggering $18,000+ bounty on offer for anyone who manages to root the handset.
Geohot is considered the father of jailbreak since 2007 and we all know that he left jailbreak scene after some problems with Apple and the US government. At any rate as an Apple fanboy I am happy for Android and Samsung users and we hope to see Geohot coming back to Apple world.
What do you think ?
