You’re probably familiar with two developers by the name of David Wang and Cyril Cattiaux, also known as PlanetBeing and pod2g. If you’re reading this, you’re likely waiting for them to release an untethered jailbreak for iOS 6 and the iPhone 5. The good news is they’re not working on the jailbreak alone.
The iOS 6 jailbreaking effort seems to be picking up speed as other developers have begun contributing their own expertise to the movement. Here are the recent developments…
Pictured: Nikias Bassen, David Wang, Cyril Cattiaux, and Joshua Hill, presenting at Hack In The Box 2012
First off, Nikias Bassen, the developer known as Pimskeks, has returned to security research and jailbreaking after taking time off to spend with his family. Along with Cattiaux and Wang, Bassen was part of the ‘Dream Team’ responsible for the Absinthe 2.0 jailbreak. Just yesterday the developer posted: “no time to rest, time to get something done!”
Then there are other experts who are looking for exploits from other angles. For example, Joshua Drake, a security researcher and winner of DefCon 18’s ‘Capture The Flag’ hacker competition suggested looking for webkit exploits, the rendering engine behind Safari, and other developers asked whether or not an exploit in Safari would be viable. Joshua Hill, another developer behind the iOS 5 jailbreak, was quick to respond:
@jduck1337 @swisshttp sandbox isn’t a huge issue, we just haven’t dug into webkit to much (except @comex)
— Joshua Hill (@p0sixninja) January 20, 2013
It wasn’t long before another security researcher replied:
@p0sixninja @jduck1337 Good to know. Maybe I’ll have a look then, if I find some time.
— http (@SwissHttp) January 20, 2013
Also, since we posted our last story about pod2g and PlanetBeing’s progress, it seems the developers have continued to make progress. Here’s a tweet pod2g posted on Monday:
Hey @planetbeing, please look at your IRC, I think I have good news!
— pod2g (@pod2g) January 21, 2013
While this all looks encouraging, keep in mind none of this means we’ll see a publicly released jailbreak in the immediate future. Even after when the jailbreak itself is finished, the developers are likely to hold off for testing and the final release of iOS 6.1.