Checkra1n team gets jailbreak working on iOS 14 beta

It was only a couple of days ago that Apple unveiled iOS and iPadOS 14 during the company’s WWDC 2020 keynote. Shortly after that, Apple launched its first developer beta of the updated mobile operating systems, allowing developers to go hands-on with the new features and prepare their apps for the update before it launches sometime this Fall.

While iOS and iPadOS 14 snagged a ton of features from the jailbreak community as Apple does every year with each substantial release, it doesn’t seem like jailbreaking will be going anywhere any time soon. In a Tweet shared late last night, checkra1n team co-developer Dany Lisiansky shared a teaser screenshot of the checkra1n jailbreak on the first iOS 14 beta:

Here we see iOS 14’s new App Library interface, with one of the organizers labeled “Other” playing host to the checkra1n loader app and the Cydia package manager.

Albeit awesome that the checkra1n team managed to get things working so quickly, it’s also worth noting that the checkra1n jailbreak was created with a hardware-based bootrom exploit called checkm8, and this means that the jailbreak can’t be patched with a mere software update as traditional tfp0 exploit-based jailbreaks like unc0ver can be.

According to Lisiansky, the checkra1n jailbreak did necessitate quite a bit of up tweaking to work with the new iOS 14 beta, and this is likely because Apple obfuscated a lot of iOS’ and iPadOS’ internal mechanisms to make pwning it more difficult. Still though, upon teaming up checkra1n co-developer Sam Bingner, Lisiansky said it was more or less a walk through the park to figure things out.

Just like before, the checkra1n jailbreak depends on certain devices with the supported A9-A11 hardware chips inside, including handsets as old as the iPhone 5s and as new as the iPhone X. Unfortunately, the iPhone 5s and iPhone 6/6 Plus do not support iOS 14, so only newer handsets up to and including the iPhone X will be supported.

It remains to be seen when the checkra1n jailbreak tool will receive an official update with iOS 14 support. One of two things could happen: 1) the checkra1n team could release an update to support the beta releases throughout beta testing; or 2) the checkra1n team could wait until this Fall when iOS 14 is officially released to the general public. Either way, there’s still quite a bit of work to be done before it’ll be ready for public testing.

Are you excited to see that iOS 14 has been pwned so quickly? Let us know in the comments section below.