News

Pangu Team teases unpatchable SEP vulnerability at Mosec 2020

It was a pleasant surprise waking up this morning to learn that the Pangu Team had successfully pwned iOS 14 using their own proprietary exploits and demoed it at the Mosec 2020 conference. Although this jailbreak in particular isn’t likely to be released, it shows that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel despite Apple’s ongoing efforts to snuff out jailbreaking once and for all.

But an iOS 14 jailbreak wasn’t the only thing that the Pangu Team shared during their presentation. Team member @windknown also discussed details encompassing security research with Apple’s proprietary SEP (Secure Enclave Processor) chips, which are used for storing valuable data including Face ID & Touch ID information and passcode data, among other things of utmost confidentiality.

Pangu Team demos working iOS 14 jailbreak at Mosec 2020

Apple’s upcoming iOS & iPadOS 14 software updates aren’t slated to be released until sometime this Fall, but that hasn’t stopped prominent jailbreak community hackers from getting their hands dirty with the developer pre-releases and working their usual magic.

The first example of an iOS 14 jailbreak was shared by the checkra1n team mere days after Apple teased the update at WWDC 2020, but this was expected as checkra1n utilizes a hardware-based bootrom exploit that can’t be patched with a software update. Early this morning, however, the Pangu Team took the stage at Mosec 2020 to demonstrate a working jailbreak of their own on the iOS 14 platform.

Lyricize fetches song lyrics and displays them on the Lock Screen

If you’re the type of person who likes to follow along with song lyrics while listening to music, then you might find that the iOS platform isn’t quite as supportive of your needs out of the box as it could be.

Luckily, that’s what we have the jailbreak community for, and there’s a newly released and free jailbreak tweak in town dubbed Lyricize by iOS developer level3tjg that puts song lyrics directly on the Lock Screen to make following along with your favorite music easier.

This tweak lets users reassign the Reachability gesture to other actions

Although I don’t use my iPhone’s Reachability interface that often, I do think that the gesture for invoking it is particularly clever on notched devices. Unfortunately, since I don’t really use Reachability that much, I find that the gesture goes to waste more than being useful.

If, like me, you rarely use the Reachability interface and would rather use the convenient Home Bar-based gesture for something more useful, then you’ll probably like a newly released and free jailbreak tweak called CantReachMe by iOS developer woodfairy. With it, you can map the native Reachability gesture to a new action of your choosing.

Unc0ver v5.3.1 update auto-removes leftover files from RootlessJB

The unc0ver team released unc0ver v5.3.0 just a few hours ago with support for iOS 12.3-12.3.1 and iOS 12.4.1-12.4.8 on a small number of handsets including the iPhone 5s, iPhone 6, and iPad Air 1st generation. For what it’s worth, iOS 12.4.8 is the latest firmware that can be installed on these specific devices, making today’s unc0ver update a particularly significant win for the jailbreak community.

Shortly after the aforementioned release, the unc0ver team pushed a second update to its jailbreak tool, this time dubbed unc0ver v5.3.1. The news was first shared Wednesday afternoon by the unc0ver team via Twitter:

Unc0ver updated to v5.3.0 with support for iOS 12.4.8 & more on older handsets

Team unc0ver launched an updated version of the unc0ver jailbreak tool Thursday afternoon in a move that brings it up to version 5.3.0.

Citing the official announcement shared by the unc0ver team’s Twitter account, the updated jailbreak tool adds support for Apple’s new iOS 12.4.8 firmware for older devices such as the iPhone 5s, iPhone 6, and first-generation iPad Air: