On Wednesday, Apple seeded the first beta of iOS 6.1.1 to developers. It came just a few days after evasi0n was released to the public, so it was widely assumed that it had something to do with patching the new jailbreak.
Pod2g has since squashed the theory, at least for now, reporting that the beta doesn’t mess with any of their exploits. But as it turns out, it wouldn’t matter if it did, because the evad3rs still have several of them in reserve…
“The team of hackers that calls themselves the evad3rs say they actually had a full exploit capable of removing all the security restrictions on iOS 6.1 devices working more than a month ago, but chose not to release it until they could replace many of the components of the hack with less valuable exploits, reserving the more powerful techniques for future projects.”
When it was all said and done, David Wang (aka planetbeing) says that the evad3rs were able to swap out all of their major exploits with lower-value hacks—except for one bug used to execute code in the iOS device kernel.
Wang says that while the exploits it has in reserve don’t necessarily add up to a jailbreak, he feels confident that with more research, they’ll be able to hack the next version of iOS—something folks have become skeptical about.
“Even if we could only find another one or two more [bugs], we’d still have at least one more jailbreak left in us,” planetbeing tells Forbes’ Andy Greenberg. “It’s getting harder. But there are still a lot of vulnerabilities left.”
Earlier today, it was announced that that the current jailbreak has already been used on more than 7 million devices since it was released on Monday.