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AEA OTA/IPSW decryption

Prerequisites

Building and Installing

get_key.py

pip3 install -r requirements.txt

[!NOTE] It is highly recommended to use a virtual environment:

python3 -m venv .env  # only needed once
source .env/bin/activate
pip3 install -r requirements.txt  # only needed once

On future runs, you only need to activate the virtual environment:

source .env/bin/activate

aastuff/aastuff_standalone

You can pass two options to the makefile:

make [DEBUG=1] [HPKE=1]

Grabbing keys with get_key.py

Unwrap the decryption key using the data embedded in an AEA's auth data blob.

[!NOTE] OTAs before iOS 18.0 beta 3 did not have embedded auth data; for these OTAs, you must use the decryption key provided with your response. macOS is the exception and has always had embedded auth data.

source .env/bin/activate  # if you used a virtual environment
python3 get_key.py <path to AEA>

Decrypting an AEA

aea decrypt -i <path to AEA> -o <decrypted output file> -key-value 'base64:<key in base64>'
# or
./aastuff -i <path to AEA> -o <decrypted output folder> -d -k <key in base64>
# or, to use the network to grab the private key
./aastuff -i <path to AEA> -o <decrypted output folder> -d -n

For IPSWs, you will get the unwrapped file (ie. 090-34187-052.dmg.aea will decrypt to 090-34187-052.dmg).

For assets, you will get specially crafted Apple Archives (see next section).

Extracting assets

Assets (including OTA updates) are constructed specially and cannot be extracted with standard (aa) tooling. They can be decrypted normally, which will result in an Apple Archive that is not extractable with aa (we will call these "asset archives"). aastuff must be used to extract them.

# Decrypt if necessary
aea decrypt -i <path to AEA> -o <decrypted asset archive> -key-value 'base64:<key in base64>'
./aastuff -i <decrypted asset archive> -o <output folder>

aastuff can also handle asset archives that are not already decrypted:

./aastuff -i <path to AEA> -o <output folder> -k <key in base64>

Run ./aastuff -h for full usage information.

[!NOTE] aastuff_standalone has more features, including file listings and selective extraction. Run ./aastuff_standalone -h for full usage information.

Notes

aastuff uses AAAssetExtractor, functions from libAppleArchive in order to extract asset archives. However, it is a pretty barren API and does not offer things like selective extraction.

aastuff_standalone uses (mostly) standard libAppleArchive functions to extract asset archives. It offers things such as file listings and selective extraction, but is not fully validated against all possible asset archives.

For now, both are built and used in the same way. Once aastuff_standalone is fully functional and validated, aastuff will be deprecated.

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