The Odyssey jailbreak saw a staggered release that first began with a public beta just over a month ago, but as of today, the Odyssey jailbreak is now officially available for avid jailbreakers to download and use to their hearts’ content with no such 'beta' tag attached to the name.
The announcement was shared via the official Odyssey Twitter page just minutes ago:
Upon refreshing the /r/jailbreak subreddit Wednesday evening, many jailbreakers were pleasantly surprised to learn about the release of a novel jailbreak-centric utility dubbed Inferius by @marijuanARM.
After a quick scan of the release notes on the project’s official GitHub page, it becomes apparent that Inferius was created to aid users in the process of creating and restoring from custom IPSW files. Quite the attention-grabbing feat indeed, but you’ll definitely want to read more about Inferius before you start jumping right in.
There’s some potentially exciting news for the jailbreak community this weekend after hacker and security researcher @08Tc3wBB teased what appears to be a newfangled approach to exploiting the latest public release of iOS on one of Apple’s current-generation iPhones.
Citing one of @08Tc3wBB’s latest Tweets, it would appear that the hacker successfully pwned an iPhone 11 Pro Max running iOS 13.6.1 without using a traditional tfp0-style exploit like those used in the majority of modern jailbreaks like Odyssey and unc0ver:
Nearing the end of last month, the Pangu Team took the stage at MOSEC 2020 to discuss a plethora of interesting topics, one of which really stood out from the rest. We’re of course talking about the unpatchable hardware based SEPROM vulnerability that targets a device’s secure enclave processor (SEP).
It wasn’t long after the SEPROM vulnerability was discovered and notes about it were published that famous hackers like Luca Todesco of the checkra1n team began tinkering with it. In fact, it was only yesterday that Todesco Tweeted some particularly eye-catching photos of checkra1n integration on an iOS device and of a T2-equipped Mac running the vulnerability as shown by the Touch Bar’s OLED display:
Odyssey Team lead developer CoolStar took to Twitter late Thursday evening to Tweet a direct download link to the Odyssey jailbreak tool’s third public beta release. This tool not only jailbreaks your handset, but also installs the Sileo package manager for tweak and app management – Cydia and other alternative package managers can be installed after the fact.
The third public beta of the Odyssey jailbreak comes nearly two weeks after the launch of the second public beta and incorporates a plethora of bug fixes and improvements in addition to updated exploit settings on a per-device basis.
The slew of revitalizing jailbreak news recently is nothing short of exciting for anyone that’s heavily invested in the process of pwning of iPhones and iPads. Fortunately, it seems like there’s still a lot of exciting news and teasers to be witnessed by devoted members of the community.
Odyssey Team member Hayden Seay (also known by his online handle Diatrus) took to Twitter early Saturday morning to share a particularly captivating picture of what seems to be an iPhone getting its operating system restored via software running on an iPad:
Ever since the unc0ver team issued a DMCA take down request for the Odyssey jailbreak GitHub page, many avid jailbreakers have been waiting for the smoke to clear. At this time, the investigation is still pending, and no official verdict has been declared. Odyssey lead developer CoolStar did, however, respond to the DMCA take down with an appeal. Now we wait to see what happens...
In the meantime, those avidly waiting for the Odyssey jailbreak to launch have been forced to wait longer than expected to download and use the tool. CoolStar’s most recently ETA for release is ‘whenever GitHub restores the repository,’ but things took an interesting turn early Sunday morning when CoolStar Tweeted a link encompassing what appears to be a beta pre-release version of the Odyssey jailbreak tool:
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.
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.
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:
When you’re an avid jailbreaker and you hear news about a new exploit that could potentially be used to jailbreak the latest version of iOS, then you tend to get excited about it. This response is only natural, especially given Apple’s rather conspicuous practice of rapidly releasing software updates to patch the very exploits hackers release in order to jailbreak iPhones and iPads alike.
With that in mind, jailbreakers might be particularly thrilled to learn that a new tfp0 exploit has been cooked up for Apple’s brand-new iOS & iPadOS 13.6 release, which was dropped to the public only yesterday afternoon. The news was first shared via Twitter user and security researcher @_Simo36 Thursday morning:
More good news surfaced for the jailbreak community this weekend as hacker and iOS tinkerer Brandon Plank launched a new open source semi-untethered rootless jailbreak that supports all versions of iOS 12 dubbed RootlessJB4.
Rootless jailbreaks are essentially a category of jailbreak that avoid messing with the device’s root filesystem. As you might come to expect, this makes them more restrictive than their full-fledged jailbreak counterparts, such as checkra1n or unc0ver. On the other hand, rootless jailbreaks are, by nature, more difficult to detect by apps that implement jailbreak detection.