PSA: Stop asking if Palera1n will ever support anything newer than the iPhone X, it doesn’t.

If you’ve paid any attention to the jailbreak community lately, chances are you’ve never heard of palera1n. It’s a pretty big deal these days.

Palera1n is actually the only public jailbreak tool for iOS or iPadOS 15.2 and later, but with one caveat: it only supports these firmware versions on phones with an A9-A11 chip.

While this is a major hurdle for many would-be jailbreakers, given the age of the aforementioned devices is starting to show, this will never change because Palera1n uses the checkm8 bootloader hardware exploit to achieve jailbreak.

So what is checkm8? We introduced it to our readers when it was announced in September 2019 and it has been the focus of modern jailbreaks ever since.

Because checkm8 is a hardware bootrom exploit, it is physically present in all A5-A11 chips and cannot be patched by Apple via a software update. The only way Apple could fix the exploit was to recall all A5-A11 devices and install updated chips in them, but that would be too costly for the company, and even if they did, many people would keep their vulnerable devices for the sake of jailbreak.

It is for this reason that the same exploit that was used to create checkra1n back in the days of iOS 12 was so easily updated to support iOS and iPadOS 13 and 14 afterwards. While the checkra1n team no longer actively maintains their tool, Palera1n has sort of appeared. to take its place for iOS and iPadOS 15 and 16.

But one thing that really makes us stand out in responses to the palera1n team’s tweets is the endless stream of questions about when the tool will add support for devices with A12 and newer chips, and it goes without saying that the answer to that question is a very firm never.

And these questions aren’t unique to Twitter – unfortunately, you ‘ll find them on Reddit too.

You see, the iPhone XR and newer are equipped with A12 and newer chips that are not vulnerable to the checkm8 bootloader exploit. Unfortunately, the exploit is fully patched on these devices, so there is no way to add support. This would require a brand new bootrom exploit for new Apple chips, and these are extremely rare – we usually only see a new bootrom exploit announced once every decade or so, so they definitely don’t grow on trees like some of these other exploits that Apple is easy to fix.

Instead, achieving a jailbreak on newer hardware requires not only a kernel exploit that supports all expected firmware versions, but also various methods to bypass security measures found in Apple’s latest hardware and software, including but not limited to bypassing pointer authentication codes (PAC). and page protection layer (PPL) bypass, which must also support each expected firmware version. So you can see where it gets resource intensive very quickly.

Unfortunately, Apple’s latest hardware and software security measures have made it even more difficult to get a jailbreak on new devices running anything newer than iOS or iPadOS 15.2, so unless someone dedicates the necessary time and uses valuable methods, like the ones discussed above to do If anything is possible, jailbreaking for newer devices is unlikely to come true without a magic silver bullet like another bootrom exploit.

The excessive work involved in creating jailbreaks and the low reward that seems to come when Apple releases a software update to fix it in just a few days or weeks is practically draining the motivation and morale of hackers. This, combined with the issues discussed above, explains why we haven’t seen an all-device jailbreak tool for iOS and iPadOS 15.2 and later. Instead, we only have palera1n, which only supports older devices that few people regularly use as a daily driver. Those running pre-iOS and iPadOS 15.2 firmware have other options like XinaA15.

Given these issues, it will be interesting to see where the community goes.