Luca Todesco Demonstrates iOS 16.1 Beta Jailbreak at Hexacon Security Conference

Speaking Friday at the Hexacon security conference in Paris, France, hacker and security researcher Luca Todesco discussed Apple’s latest mobile software security trends and showed off a jailbreak of the iOS 16.1 beta.

Known not only for his work on the checkra1n jailbreak, but also for his efforts on projects such as PongoOS and the Yalu jailbreak for some phones running iOS 10, Todesco is generally an influential figure in the jailbreak community, and for a reason.

Shahar Tal, VP of Business Development at Cellebrite, shared the tweet line above with images of Todesco on stage and some of his exciting Keynote slides, some of which are pictured above.

“Apple made it harder for us,” Todesco noted on the slide, sharing his opinion with other hackers in today’s jailbreak community regarding Apple’s ongoing efforts to prevent jailbreaks not only with new software, but with better hardware.

Todesco also pointed to things like the new iOS lockdown mode and increased security mechanisms to show that Apple finally seems to be taking user security more seriously than jailbreaking.

Notably, a similar critique of Apple was made by 08Tc3wBB in our exclusive interview with him almost a year ago, so it looks like Apple may finally be listening to the security researchers who are fighting to make our personal devices more secure.

Todesco also stressed that now is not the right time for an iOS cracker due to how hard Apple has taken it, and due to Apple’s rapid pace of improvement, it is becoming increasingly difficult for hackers to bypass the company’s security mechanisms.

Todesco also noted that this is a tough time for anyone new to iOS security research because there is so little public knowledge that most research depends on either experience or access to private knowledge that Apple will keep strictly secret. Also, the public knowledge of security research is said to be one to two years behind the current security measures used by Apple, so for anyone starting today, this will be much more than just a small problem.

While Todesco initially set a gloomy tone for jailbreakers, stating that Apple was winning the battle, that tone was quickly replaced with a jailbreak demo on Apple’s latest firmware, iOS 16.1 beta:

Todesco’s trial jailbreak came about a week after Linus Henze demonstrated the Fugu15 jailbreak on iOS 15.4.1.

From the looks of it, Apple can make it much harder to hack iOS and iPadOS, but the company is clearly no match for a seasoned hacker who knows his stuff.