Linus Henze, the talented security researcher that brought us the Fugu15 rootless developer jailbreak that eventually helped lead to the creation of the Dopamine jailbreak for end users on iOS & iPadOS 15.0-15.4.1, turned a few heads on Wednesday with respect to his GitHub page.
To start, Henze appears to have published a rootful version of his Fugu15 developer jailbreak, proving once and for all that it was indeed possible to remain rootful all along. Current iOS & iPadOS 15 jailbreaks have moved to rootless, a different dynamic that has its own list of pros and cons.
Also Read: What a rootless jailbreak means for you
Like the original Fugu15, Fugu15 Rootful Edition is a semi-untethered perma-signed jailbreak for iOS 15.0-15.4.1 intended only for developers. This version includes full support for jailbreak tweaks and is rootful right out of the box.
In a post shared to /r/jailbreak, Dopamine jailbreak lead developer Lars Fröder said he knew it was possible to stay rootful for a while, but suggested that moving to rootless was better for the community long-term as the Procursus Team has already done extraordinary work to make this possible.
In fact, even the palera1n jailbreak for older checkm8 devices ditched the rootful dynamic to move to the rootless environment, which signals where we are in this community right now.
Fröder also said that he doesn’t plan to make Dopamine rootful, as the community is moving toward rootless. On the other hand, he did say that Dopamine could borrow some of the techniques used in Fugu15 Rootful Edition to benefit the community. For example, Fugu15 Rootless Edition appears to be capable of running arm64 jailbreak tweaks on arm64e devices.
Apart from the disclosure of Fugu15 Rootful Edition, the other interesting tidbit of news appears to be that Henze has archived his GitHub repository.
In what appears to be a signal that Henze could be finished with trying to make iPhone and iPad jailbreaks, absent of any official announcement, this is merely speculation.
It’s worth noting that Henze’s efforts have been instrumental in making recent hacks and jailbreaks for Apple’s mobile platforms over the past few years, including the CoreTrust bug that made TrollStore possible, and the Fugu15 rootless developer jailbreak that made Dopamine possible.
Currently, there’s a possibility that another CoreTrust bug in iOS & iPadOS 16 like the one used by TrollStore exists, as well as a PPL bypass that could make an iOS & iPadOS 16 jailbreak possible in tandem with the kfd exploit. On the other hand, there are no public write-ups about these bugs yet, which is halting any possible progress on modern hacks and jailbreaks.
It will indeed be interesting to see what becomes of the jailbreak community amid these interesting announcements and developments. After all, filling these large shoes for iOS & iPadOS 16 hasn’t happened yet as we march into the iOS & iPadOS 17 season.
What are your thoughts about Fugu15 Rootless Edition and Henze archiving his GutHub repository? Let us know in the comments section down below.