It has been a cat and mouse game all along. But it appears that a low level exploit in iOS could be making Apple’s patch efforts much more difficult. If you jailbreak your iPhone, a simple iOS update may not “break” your jailbroken iPhone anymore.

It is a rather silly game, if you think about it. Apple tries to keep its iPhone locked up to prevent unauthorized applications to run on it. A substantial number of hackers have spent lots of time breaking those locks and if we believe reports, then iOS 4.1 surrendered just about one week after its release.

The security guys from Kaspersky Labs have an interesting take on that latest exploit, stating that the recent low level exploits are much serious for Apple and it may be “impossible for Apple to fix on devices that have already been manufactured.”

The reason is that the exploits are now located in the boot ROM and includes code that is run when the phone is powered on and before iOS is loaded. Because of that reason, it is not possible to patch the exploit with a simple iOS update. Kaspersky notes that “Boot ROM vulnerabilities aren’t much different from other kinds of software bugs, but they are invisible to standard software scanning tools and require a separate process of penetration testing to discover and fix.”

The Chronic Development team that claims to already have jailbroken iOS 4.1 recently said via Twitter posts that it has applied its exploit to the iPad and new iPod Touch as well, but cannot say when it will be releasing the software. Both tethered and untethered exploits will be released, the hackers said.

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