Over the course of this past weekend weekend, we witnessed the release of another iOS 9 jailbreak called Blizzard, which supports legacy 32-bit devices running iOS 9.0-9.3.6.
Already, the tool has seen a few different updates with improvements, the latest of which appears to be a working mechanism for un-jailbreaking the device in question.
At least two updates have been released in the past 24 hours, including an initial update to version 1.2 with an initial implementation for un-jailbreaking. Later on, version 1.3 was released to further enhance this capability in addition to patching tfp0 so that tools such as kloader, kdfu, and the likes would work as expected.
One thing worth noting is that iOS 9 doesn’t use APFS snapshots, which means that the un-jailbreaking mechanism doesn’t work exactly like the rootFS restore feature in modern jailbreaks like Taurine or unc0ver. Instead, the function goes through and removes a significant portion of files installed by the jailbreak the manual way, potentially leaving one or two files behind in the process. To the naked eye, the device would look unjailbroken.
Other bug fixes and enhancements in the latest version of Blizzard include:
- Detecting if you were previously jailbroken and doesn’t attempt to re-extract the bootstrap if this was the case. Worthy of note, un-jailbreaking with Blizzard can and will remove files left behind by the aforementioned jailbreaks.
- Enhanced bootstrap extraction to ensure the creation of appropriate files
- And other kernel-related bug fixes
Citing an /r/jailbreak thread started by Blizzard developer GeoSn0w, it seems that a future update to Blizzard could include the ability to choose a different package manager besides Cydia. Currently, Zebra appears to be the only alternative package manager app on the radar.
Blizzard is an open source jailbreak, and the the latest version can be had from the project’s GitHub release page.