One of the surprise announcements at the iPhone 12 event was the return of MagSafe, albeit under a different form and purpose. Now available as an entirely new line of products, MagSafe accessories take advantage of embedded magnets to make connecting your device to a case, charger, stand, etc, a breeze.
The first MagSafe accessory to be available was the MagSafe charger, a $39 charging solution consisting of a cable and a charging puck, similar in essence to the Apple Watch charger.
Just as promised, the Odyssey Team officially released an updated build of its jailbreak tool Tuesday morning in the form of Odyssey version 1.2.1.
The Odyssey Team announced the updated jailbreak tool via Twitter, and the general public can now follow the official download links to grab the latest version for themselves:
When most people think of a jailbreak tool like checkra1n, among the first things that come to mind are iPhones, iPod touches, iPads, and Apple TVs. Interestingly enough, the checkra1n team has shown time and time again that the checkm8 bootrom exploit that powers this particular jailbreak is commanding enough to hack even some of the most arbitrary of things, including Apple’s T2 chip, which resides in a variety of Macs.
On Thursday, we learned that even Apple’s HomePod Smart Speaker devices are susceptible to the checkra1n jailbreak. The news, first shared this afternoon by Twitter user @_L1ngL1ng_, took many avid jailbreakers by surprise:
As promised, following security researcher 08Tcw3BB’s much anticipated presentation at HITB CyberWeek 2020, affiliated software security firm ZecOps has officially released an exploit for iOS & iPadOS 13.5.1-13.7.
The announcement, shared this Thursday afternoon via the ZecOps Twitter account, links to a blog post on the firm’s own website that discusses the exploit, how it works via a proof of concept, and how an attacker could use it:
The past few weeks have been crazy for anyone heavily invested in the jailbreak community. Not only was the checkra1n jailbreak updated to add support for A10(X) devices and iOS 14.1-14.2, but a new exploit PoC targeting iOS & iPadOS 13.x was released and FreeTheSandbox once again affirmed that a jailbreak with support for iOS & iPadOS 13.5-13.7 would be released in the near future without a definitive ETA.
But the community was in for yet another teaser this week after talented security researcher Liang Chen (@chenliang0817) of Singular Security Lab (@SingularSecLab) demonstrated a working jailbreak on Apple’s brand-new iPhone 12 Pro handset running iOS 14.2 — the latest publicly available firmware at the time of this writing:
Those eagerly waiting for a jailbreak with support for the concluding versions of the iOS & iPadOS 13 family before Apple officially released iOS & iPadOS 14 this Fall have two options, with the first being to wait for FreeTheSandbox to release the jailbreak they’ve been teasing for more than a month, or the second being to continue waiting for someone to pick up an exploit like the one just recently released by @_simo36.
If the FreeTheSandbox offering sounds like a better choice to you, then we’ve got some news for you. The official FreeTheSandbox Twitter account shared the following Tweet early Thursday morning to comment on the state of the jailbreak they’ve been working on:
If you’ve been paying any attention to the iOS & iPadOS security research side of things recently, then you might’ve caught wind about a kernel bug discovered by Mohamed Ghannam (@_simo36) that held the capacity to pwn iOS & iPadOS 14.1 and below. Unfortunately, Ghannam later revealed that the bug didn’t work on iOS or iPadOS 14, and instead that it would only support variants of iOS & iPadOS 13.
While the aforementioned circumstances were indeed a bummer for those who’d been looking forward to a potential exploit release for iOS & iPadOS 14, the good news is that Ghannam officially released a kernel exploit proof of concept (PoC) dubbed 'OOB Events' on Wednesday with instructions for achieving kernel task port (tfp0) on iOS & iPadOS 13.7:
One of the things that makes the checkra1n jailbreak unique is that it’s bootrom-based, which means that it’s able to jailbreak any hardware vulnerable to the checkm8 bootrom exploit. This includes iPhones, iPads, Apple TVs, and even the T2 chip that many modern Mac computers now come equipped with from the factory.
It wasn’t long ago that the checkra1n team baked official support for the T2 chip into their jailbreak tool, and as such, it may come as no surprise that some of the first T2-based hacks are beginning to trickle in. One of the latest of such hacks apparently involves modifying a T2 chip-equipped Mac Mini to play the infamous THX sound during boot-up:
Just under two weeks ago, developer Brandon Plank launched a beta macOS app dubbed iPAPatcher that allowed users to merge Dynamic Libraries (dylib) or jailbreak tweaks (.deb files) with iPhone or iPad apps (.ipa files) before installing them on a handset of your choosing. In essence, one might describe it as akin to enabling hacks and perks in your favorite apps without the need for a jailbreak.
As of this week, however, iPAPatcher is officially coming out of beta. The source code of version 1.0 of this handy utility is now published on the developer’s GitHub page, and as you might come to expect, it comes with a plethora of improvements that benefit the end user.
If you’ve poked your nose in the jailbreak community’s trending news lately, then you’ve undoubtedly caught wind about a developing jailbreak for iOS 13.5-13.7 devices. Software security researchers associated with FreeTheSandbox first announced plans to release such a jailbreak at the end of September, and there have been a number of other teasers since then.
Just this afternoon, the @FreeTheSandbox Twitter account generated more excitement among jailbreakers after it turned to the community in search of potential testers. The Tweet, shown below, appeared seek users of certain types of devices running iOS 13.5.1 through 13.7, as these will be the handset and firmware combinations that the jailbreak supports when released.
Checkra1n first picked up support for iOS & iPadOS 14 exactly one month ago starting today, but with a significant caveat in that it would initially support only A8-A9X devices. At the time, the team said it would work to add A10 support “in coming weeks,” and now that four weeks have passed since the announcement, it may come as no surprise that team member Luca Todesco addressed the community this afternoon via Twitter.
Now before your heart skips a beat on that subject, we’ll come right out and say that the latest comment contains good news. It seems that progress has been made in adding support for A10 devices running iOS & iPadOS 14, and Todesco expects a public release for this new support to happen quite soon:
Just under a month ago, security researchers with operation #FreeTheSandbox, an initiative started by security research firm ZecOps, revealed that they were working on a jailbreak with support for devices running iOS & iPadOS 13.5-13.7. The announcement garnered oodles of attention from the community, especially since current jailbreak tools like Odyssey and unc0ver only support up to and including iOS & iPadOS 13.5.
A few days later, the @FreeTheSandbox Twitter account said they were targeting a mid-November or early-December release for their jailbreak, and early Tuesday morning, the account posted a rather attention-grabbing teaser in the form of a simplistic Tweet that said, “Almost ready:”