Blizzard Update for iOS 9 Jailbreak to Un-Jailbreak and Add More Bug Fixes

This past weekend we witnessed the release of another iOS 9 jailbreak called Blizzard that supports legacy 32-bit devices running iOS 9.0-9.3.6.

The tool has already received several different upgrades with improvements, the latest of which appears to be a working mechanism to unjailbreak the device in question.

There have been at least two updates released in the last 24 hours, including an initial update to version 1.2 with the initial implementation of a jailbreak. Version 1.3 was later released to further expand this capability in addition to fixing tfp0 so that tools like kloader, kdfu and the like work properly.

It’s worth noting that iOS 9 doesn’t use APFS snapshots, which means the unlock mechanism doesn’t work exactly like the rootFS restore feature in modern jailbreaks like Taurine or unc0ver. Instead, the feature goes through and removes a large portion of the files installed by the jailbreak manually, potentially leaving one or two files in the process. To the naked eye, the device would look unhacked.

Other bug fixes and improvements in the latest version of Blizzard include:

• Detecting if you were previously hacked and not trying to re-fetch the bootstrap if it was. It should be noted that removing the jailbreak with Blizzard can and will delete the files left behind by the aforementioned jailbreaks.
• Improved bootstrap extraction to ensure proper file generation.
• And other kernel-related bug fixes

Referring to the /r/jailbreak branch started by Blizzard developer GeoSn0w, it appears that a future Blizzard update may include the ability to select a package manager other than Cydia. Currently, Zebra seems to be the only alternative packet management application on the radar.

Blizzard is an open source jailbreak, and the latest version can be obtained from the project’s GitHub release page.