While there hasn’t been any discernible movement lately with respect to jailbreaking iOS & iPadOS 15, the good news is that a lot of different potential exploits now exist in the wild, putting the ball instead in jailbreak developers’ courts. In fact, it seems that another could be on the brink of development at the time of this writing.
On Saturday, hacker Justin Sherman took to Twitter to show off what appears to be a working kernel exploit supporting iOS & iPadOS 15.2, albeit with a particularly low success rate of just 0.02% due to Apple’s security mitigations.
Citing the screenshot included in Sherman’s original Tweet, the exploit was used on an iPhone 8 (iPhone 10,4) running iOS 15.2. Sherman said that the exploit had been reported to Apple about a month ago, however he went on to explain that he doesn’t know when or if Apple will get around to patching the exploit in a future software update since they work slowly.
While a 0.02% success rate is particularly bad and likely unusable for the purposes of jailbreaking in its current state, it’s worth mentioning that exploit success rates can be improved with optimization. For example, Pwn20wnd repeatedly optimized older exploits used by the unc0ver jailbreak to enhance the success rates for end users. This could also be possible with Sherman’s exploit, however this hasn’t been confirmed.
Sherman isn’t new to the iPhone and iPad hacking game; in fact, he published notes about an exploit supporting up to and including iOS & iPadOS 14.7 at the end of November for a subset of devices. It seems unlikely that this one will be used for jailbreaking, as the unc0ver jailbreak instead picked up support for a different exploit provided by security researcher @pattern_f_.
We will continue to follow Sherman’s work along with any other iOS & iPadOS 15-centric security research developments, so keep it tuned to iDownloadBlog to stay up to date.