If you are one of those owners of non-jailbroken iOS devices like the iPhone 5, iPhone 4S, iPad 4 and iPad mini and waiting impatiently for an iOS 6 or 6.0.1 untethered jailbreak, you would be glad to know that the highly awaited exploit is being worked on and good progress has been made till now.

However, it would be foolish to expect an untethered jailbreak ready for public use soon as, according to prominent Chronic Dev hacker planetbeing, some “critical pieces” are still missing.

Although planetbeing tweeted a picture of an iPhone 5 running the jailbreak app IntelliscreenX earlier this week, the hacker said that a public release of the jailbreak would take some time.

“Can’t say too much, but we’re still missing critical pieces so it’s not releasable right now,” planetbeing told Cult of Mac. “Believe me, we’d love to release it ASAP.”

“I would characterize it more as finding the missing pieces rather than debugging at this stage,” said planetbeing. “Typically the messiest part of the jailbreak process has been installing it in the first place. We’re further along than WWJC. But again, I can’t give any specifics. The jailbreak itself is stable but we’re missing needed exploits. I can’t discuss what we’re missing.”

Asked if the iPhone 5 jailbreak was “grim,” the hacker replied, “Not at all.”

Last week an update on iOS 6 and iOS 6.0.1 untethered jailbreak by Greenpois0n Absinthe developer Joshua Hill from the Chronic Dev Team aka p0sixninja caused a lot of excitement as some blogs misinterpreted it and spread the news that an untethered iOS 6 jailbreak for the iPhone 5 was ready to be released.

P0sixninja tweeted that the “current status of an iPhone 5 jailbreak is grim” but added that he was working on something even bigger. When asked about what he was talking about, the hacker tweeted that it was “BootROM and decryption keys for A5/A5X/A6/A6X.”

Following his tweet, a lot of reports surfaced online suggesting that p0sixninja had found BootROM and decryption keys. This misinterpretation led to the misunderstanding that the untethered iOS 6 and iOS 6.0.1 jailbreak was apparently ready for public release.

Another well-known iOS jailbreak developer, MuscleNerd, stepped in to clarify the confusion and tweeted that “Bootrom hasn’t even been dumped since 2010, let alone crashed or exploited.” He explained that p0sixninja had never said that he had managed to find BootROM and decryption keys but had merely said that he was working on it.

However, MuscleNerd mentioned that progress had been made in the terms of the exploit and if p0sixninja successfully found the decryption keys, the codes could then be confirmed as proof of an exploit.

Scams Doing The Rounds, Don’t Get Fooled

In the past few weeks, a number of fake iPhone 5 untethered jailbreaks have been spotted over the Internet that seem to con users who are desperate to get an iOS 6 untethered jailbreak for their devices.

Here are three fake websites that claim to offer an iOS 6 untethered jailbreak. These websites have been designed in such a way that they closely resemble the genuine websites of the Dev-Team members:

http://absinthev3.blogspot.com/

http://absinthev3.blogspot.de/

http://pod2gblog.blogspot.com/

These websites claim to have released Absinthe v3, an iOS 6 and 6.0.1 untethered jailbreak for non-jailbroken devices like the iPhone 5, iPhone 4S, iPad 4 and iPad mini.

IBTimes warns the users of the aforementioned devices not to get fooled by these phony websites. They should follow the iPhone Dev Team site, the Chronic Dev Team site and the greenp0ison site for any update.

iPhone Dev Team member MuscleNerd has confirmed two more sites as fraud. The first one is http://greenpois0nblog.blogspot.com/ that apparently copies a lot of content from the original absinthe site to fool users. The second one is http://redpois0n.net/.

Both the sites claim to have download links of an untethered iOS 6 and 6.0.1 Jailbreak for iPhone 5, 4s, 4, 3Gs, iPad 3 & iPad 2, which, according to MuscleNerd, are phony.

"JB's have never materialized overnight without it being publicized well in advance (during testing)," the hacker said.