The past couple of months have been an interesting time to be a part of the iPhone and iPad jailbreaking community. With iOS & iPadOS 17 now available, and still no public iOS & iPadOS 16 jailbreak for arm64e devices, a slew of kernel exploits and wind about a PPL bypass have raised hopes that we may see another season of jailbreaking.
Despite warnings from high-profile security researchers like Luca Todesco about Apple winning the hacker vs. security battle with iPhone & iPad jailbreakers, it seems that @dora2ios, the developer behind older jailbreak tools such as kok3shi has taken to X (formerly Twitter) to tease what appears to be an iPadOS 16 jailbreak.
The post includes a demonstration video of what the developer says is an iPad Pro 9.7-inch (2016/1st generation) model running iPadOS 16.6 beta 1. As this is an arm64 device sporting an A9X chip, the jailbreak doesn’t require a PPL or PAC bypass as an arm64e device would need.
An attached screenshot shows the device statistics at the bottom of a Sileo package manager app window:
Perhaps even more interesting is the fact that the jailbreak utilizes the now prolific kernel file descriptor (kfd) exploit that is being used to make MacDirtyCow-like add-ons possible on newer firmware versions without a jailbreak.
According to the post, the jailbreak is semi-untethered just like most modern jailbreak tools, and there don’t appear to be any plans to release it publicly. This tends to be common among jailbreak developers who wish to keep their work private for security research purposes.
But there’s no need for you to feel left out because of this tease, and that’s because the palera1n jailbreak already covers this (and many other older checkm8 bootrom exploit-vulnerable devices) running any version of iOS or iPadOS 16.
In any case, it’s interesting to see the kfd exploit being used for jailbreaking. Still, we won’t see arm64e devices being jailbroken via kfd without a PPL bypass, so hopefully that one that was fixed in iOS & iPadOS 17 makes it into the light at some point.
Are you excited to see someone who continues to work on jailbreaks? Let us know in the comments section down below.