AEA OTA/IPSW decryption
get_key.py
Gets a key from the key URL 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 key provided with your response. macOS is the exception.
pip3 install -r requirements.txt
python3 get_key.py <path to AEA>
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
python3 get_key.py <path to AEA>
aea decrypt -i <path to AEA> -o <decrypted output file> -key-value 'base64:<key in base64>'
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 AppleArchives (see next section).
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 AppleArchive 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.
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.