Talk:OTA Updates

Encryption
Are the updates encrypted in any way (VFDecrypt?) --5urd 18:31, 30 August 2011 (MDT)
 * No. Just regular Zips. --M2m 22:36, 30 August 2011 (MDT)
 * Only NOR payloads and RAM disks are encrypted, rest of the "asset" is unencrypted --pjakuszew 04:19, 31 August 2011 (MDT)
 * But if you need to update iTunes to 'decrypt' the newest firmware (as iTunes contains the 'password' to do so), then that means that the encrypted stuff has a 'password' that is somewhere on the file system. Maybe if we could access it, we could get them. (maybe disassembling iTunes could get us them also :D) --5urd 11:12, 31 August 2011 (MDT)
 * iTunes doesn't contain any "passwords" 5urd. Everything is done on the device and usually uses the device's built in hardware AES crypt keys. -- iH8sn0w 13:32, 31 August 2011 (EST)
 * Dang, but then why do we need to update iTunes to update our device? --5urd 11:35, 31 August 2011 (MDT)
 * Its purpose is to send out firmware files to the device, and only that. --pjakuszew 11:36, 31 August 2011 (MDT)
 * I still don't get the point of updating iTunes (other than avoiding an error) --5urd 11:45, 31 August 2011 (MDT)
 * Updating is required because of incompatibilites with newer iOS versions. I think it's about Fairplay and encryption of iPod library database. Another example is support of new hardware; how would you update a 3GS with iTunes 7.5? --pjakuszew 11:56, 31 August 2011 (MDT)
 * Ok, that makes sense. Thanks! --5urd 12:14, 31 August 2011 (MDT)

Tracker
Anyone into making a watchguard that tracks mesu.apple.com for changes (and records them)? --M2m 00:55, 12 November 2011 (MST)
 * I did a crude one. It works by comparing against a list of already done URLs in an array --5urd 13:16, 12 November 2011 (MST)
 * I would just curl --user-agent="softwareupdateservicesd (unknown version) CFNetwork/539 Darwin/11.0.0" http://mesu.apple.com/assets/com_apple_MobileAsset_SoftwareUpdate/com_apple_MobileAsset_SoftwareUpdate.xml -o OTA.xml and pipe it into shasum. In case shasum change, save as new version with date and time (and display)... --M2m 19:00, 12 November 2011 (MST)
 * One problem with that is that I can't test it on my computer here at my house as I am on windows. To test it with curl I would need to upload it to my website. What I did was open a connection with fsockopen, sent some request headers, then read the response to a string. After that, I parsed the plist to an array. Unfortunately, the parser leaves some artifacts on the hash as it is a compressed hash. So I decided to use the file location instead. It still works pretty well. I had to remove the URL form area as it messed with the array in unwanted ways. I am working on moving it from an array to just line by line URLs preventing the failure as I just append the line to it. When I finish it, I will post the code on my website. --5urd 21:43, 12 November 2011 (MST)
 * curl is avialable for windows --M2m 04:43, 13 November 2011 (MST)
 * doesn't matter, it already works and spits out a nice table. --5urd 16:05, 13 November 2011 (MST)
 * So is your tracker available online already ? --M2m 19:59, 26 November 2011 (MST)
 * Yes. When you add a link to the wiki, you can add it to the textbox one per line and click submit and it wont show up again. --5urd 13:37, 27 November 2011 (MST)
 * Spammers. It doesn't work because it works like this:

for (  $i = 0;   $i < sizeof(array_keys($plist['Assets']));   $i++) {  if (     !in_array( $plist['Assets'][$i]['__BaseURL']. $plist['Assets'][$i]['__RelativePath'], $usedurls)    ) {    // Output table } }
 * --5urd 17:34, 27 November 2011 (MST)
 * Should do the trick to make a backup of OTA.xml's whenever there is a change

SHA_OLD=1 while true; do SHA_CUR=$(curl --user-agent 'softwareupdateservicesd (unknown version) CFNetwork/539 Darwin/11.0.0' http://mesu.apple.com/assets/com_apple_MobileAsset_SoftwareUpdate/com_apple_MobileAsset_SoftwareUpdate.xml | shasum) if [ "$SHA_OLD" = "$SHA_CUR" ]; then echo nothing to do else NOW=$(date +"%F") NOWT=$(date +"%T") echo download curl --user-agent 'softwareupdateservicesd (unknown version) CFNetwork/539 Darwin/11.0.0' http://mesu.apple.com/assets/com_apple_MobileAsset_SoftwareUpdate/com_apple_MobileAsset_SoftwareUpdate.xml -o OTA_$NOW-$NOWT.xml SHA_OLD=$(curl --user-agent 'softwareupdateservicesd (unknown version) CFNetwork/539 Darwin/11.0.0' http://mesu.apple.com/assets/com_apple_MobileAsset_SoftwareUpdate/com_apple_MobileAsset_SoftwareUpdate.xml | shasum) fi sleep 600 done
 * 1) !/bin/bash
 * --M2m 08:33, 24 March 2012 (MDT)

Carrier Beta
What is a carrier beta? --5urd 18:33, 9 January 2012 (MST)
 * Most likely a beta for carrier provisions. --rdqronos 16:19, 26 March 2012 (MDT)
 * --5urd 14:33, 21 July 2012 (MDT)

Applying .patch files from OTA updates
Hey guys, has anyone successfully "patched" a file with a .patch file from the "patches" folder of an OTA update? I am trying to do this and can't get it to work. I have tried on OS X, iOS, and Linux, with multiple different patches, and always get the same error:

patch: **** Only garbage was found in the patch input. With --verbose option: Hmm... I can't seem to find a patch in there anywhere. I understand from some research that common .patch files have a certain syntax to them, bu I have looked inside these .patch files (using a text editor) and they never contain any readable text (even a .txt.patch file). This leads me to believe that iOS uses a specific and exclusively designed version of Patch. If so, how would I make use of that?

Ideally I would patch the files on-device via SSH, as I am developing something yet-to-be-announced which would need to do so automatically. If needed, it could alternatively be done using Mac OS X or Linux.

I would greatly appreciate any help, --ValleyForge 23:12, 28 June 2012 (MDT)
 * I'd like to help, but I need to learn :P --Haifisch 21:49, 5 July 2012 (MDT)
 * I actually figured it out, you have to use the bspatch command which is available on iOS, Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows :) --ValleyForge 22:59, 5 July 2012 (MDT)
 * Fancy wanna iMessage me and we can brain storm what good can come out of this. Maybe a jailbreak technique ;) --Haifisch 10:21, 6 July 2012 (MDT)
 * Quick note: all OTA updates are signed with a private key owned by Apple. Unless you get into that department of Apple, you can't sign them without brute force. --5urd 12:09, 6 July 2012 (MDT)

File Names
Does anyone have the slightest on how Apple names their files? It looks like a hash that is 20 bytes long (40 hex chars/160 bits). From this list, there are a few like that, but none that I have heard of. --5urd 14:32, 21 July 2012 (MDT)
 * Should be the SHA-1 of the file.--M2m 21:14, 21 July 2012 (MDT)

Resequence? and deleting files?
--ValleyForge 23:55, 29 September 2012 (MDT)
 * 1)  In most updates there are "added", "patches", and "replace" folders in the payload folder. In the iOS 6.0 updates, there is a folder among those named "resequence". What does this do? Currently the only file contained in the resequence folder is the dyld cache.
 * 2) How do OTA updates control which/whether files are deleted? Where is it specified which files are deleted, or do they delete files at all?

Documentation
Someone should make a page with the documentation links, here's the XML: http://mesu.apple.com/assets/com_apple_MobileAsset_SoftwareUpdateDocumentation/com_apple_MobileAsset_SoftwareUpdateDocumentation.xml --Srb21103 20:16, 20 November 2012 (MST)