If you’ve followed along with us in our ongoing iPhone jailbreak news coverage, then you likely caught it wind of Luca Todesco showing off an iOS 16 jailbreak at the Hexacon security conference last Friday.
The elephant in the room of course was the lingering question of whether or not Todesco planned to release his iOS 16 jailbreak, and while we had a good idea of what the answer to that question would be at the time, Todesco came out and confirmed his intentions on Twitter this week.
In the Tweet responses, Todesco said “of course not” in response to a question about whether it should be releasing his iOS 16 jailbreak. He also added that it wasn’t a full jailbreak — likely referring to the idea that there was no tweak injection or any of the good stuff us general users would want in a jailbreak, rather that it was just a barebones proof-of-concept.
But while we already sort of knew that was the case, it’s the other stuff Todesco said that’s worth going over.
While Todesco plans to continue attacking iOS firmware as a seasoned security researcher for the foreseeable future, he adds that future jailbreak releases are likely to be much rarer after Apple’s new security mechanisms which have shifted the focus away from single-bug-based jailbreaks and more toward technique-based jailbreaks, which are labor intensive to make. This makes it even more challenging to keep up with Apple’s frequent software updates.
Wondering why we only have an iOS & iPadOS 14 jailbreak in today’s iOS & iPadOS 16 era, and why an iOS & iPadOS 15 jailbreak isn’t readily available to the public yet? There’s your answer.
Todesco also predicted that future jailbreaks were unlikely to ever be 0day-based again, considering how much those kinds of bugs and exploits are worth when reported directly to Apple, we don’t blame security researchers for choosing to cash them in as opposed to making free-release jailbreaks out of them. After all, what’s their motivation?
But for Joshua Hill (@p0sixninja), this challenge is precisely the type of motivation he considers “interesting.” He even brought up the idea of reuniting the ‘Dream Team’ after former evad3rs jailbreak developer @pod2g commented on Todesco’s talk. The comment was both touching and inspirational.
Regardless of what seems like bad news, it’s important to remember that jailbreaks will always be possible as long as we have members of the jailbreak community who are willing to exploit iOS & iPadOS to make it happen. Although late to the party, several groups are currently working on iOS & iPadOS 15 jailbreaks as we speak.
Apple certainly seems to have changed the landscape for jailbreaking going forward, but everyone who wants to to it should continue to follow the wise words of staying on the lowest possible firmware and avoiding software updates.