How many people are actually working on the iOS 15 jailbreak?

The wait for iOS and iPadOS 15 jailbreak continues, even after Apple officially released iOS 16.0 to the public this week. Having said that, we fully understand your expectation of a status update and that is what we intend to provide in today’s article.

Jailbreak for iOS and iPadOS 15 is in development

Chayote

The upcoming rootless Cheyote jailbreak for iOS and iPadOS 15.0-15.1.1 by the Odyssey Team has garnered perhaps the most attention in the last few months, and for good reason. The team is generally pretty good in terms of releasing current jailbreaks and supporting them for a few months.

However, project lead developer CoolStar, visibly frustrated by the plethora of eager comments and criticism received on message boards and social media, has shared a number of controversial status updates over the past few weeks, ranging from the idea of ​​charging jailbreak release fees to deliberately delaying progress upon completion; The latest tweet from CoolStar just this morning confirms the latter:

Other members of the Sileo & Odyssey Team Discord channel have revisited some of these comments several times recently. These contestants had to play the devil’s advocate between a frustrated CoolStar and an increasingly impatient audience that month after month watched the calendar pages turn without jailbreak on a device they deliberately kept on iOS 15.0-15.1.1.

CoolStar originally said that Cheyote would be its last jailbreak release, and it looks like it will be. CoolStar has found a more lucrative home in the ChromeOS community, where it currently mods the platform, and this is due to the delays we’ve seen with Cheyote.

While the Odyssey team has yet to release a definitive ETA for the Cheyote jailbreak, we know from a relatively recent status update that most of the delays are due to the migration of Theos, the tool the developers use to set up the jailbreak, to libhooker. dynamic. This will take some time, but after that, the first developers will receive a closed beta version of Cheyote for testing.

check

We also kept a close eye on the checkra1n team, however they were much less vocal about their progress. In fact, the most recent status update we received from them was in December 2021 and indicated that team member Siguza was looking to create a new volume to populate with any jailbreak content that couldn’t be snap-mounted now that allied mounts were not longer possible on iOS and iPadOS 15.

While there have certainly been few status updates from the checkra1n team, that doesn’t mean someone isn’t working on it. In fact, a quick look at the GitHub page reveals that Siguza is actively tweaking the code, albeit in small increments:

The last time I corresponded with Siguza, he wanted me to emphasize that this project will not be ready anytime soon. He is a man of his word. There is currently no ETA for checkra1n to support iOS or iPadOS 15, and we don’t even know what versions of iOS and iPadOS 15 they will support. However, we know that it will only work with devices equipped with the A7-A11 chip since checkra1n uses the checkm8 bootrom hardware exploit.

blizzard

Another new contender for iOS and iPadOS 15 jailbreak development is Blizzard developer geosn0w. He appears to be trying to develop his first iOS and iPadOS 15 jailbreak based on the checkm8 bootrom exploit, which means that, like checkra1n, he will only be able to jailbreak A7-A11 devices up to and including the iPhone X.

Although geosn0w’s portfolio currently only contains a tool designed for iOS 9 devices, he reasonably admitted that he did not know if he had the skills to jailbreak iOS and iPadOS 15. However, he intends to try anyway. iOS and iPadOS 15 have far more anti-jailbreak protections than iOS 9, which is one of the reasons we don’t have jailbreaks for this firmware yet.

Given the complexities involved in jailbreaking iOS and iPadOS 15, geosn0w has not provided an ETA or even a guarantee that its jailbreak will be released. Actually, it’s very experimental. Like CoolStar, geosn0w attempts to publish a running list of what needs to be done to complete a jailbreak, with small steps that come up over time.

Fugu15

iDB believes that while keeping something that has real potential to be the best, it’s especially important to mention Linus Henze, the security researcher behind the Fugu14 release, which was known to be tied to the unc0ver jailbreak via AltStore, to add support for A12-A14. devices running iOS and iPadOS 14.4–14.5.1.

As you may remember from one of our posts earlier this year, Henze plans to give a talk at the Objective by the Sea conference next month, where he plans to present how you can jailbreak iOS and iPadOS 15.4. all the latest security measures. Mitigation Henze will talk about all the vulnerabilities used in the Fugu15 chain and how many security measures can be bypassed.

But perhaps more interestingly, Henze says that he will demonstrate an “interesting and unusual”way to install Fugu15 on a device.

It remains to be seen if Henze plans to release Fugu15, or even if he will collaborate with unc0ver team lead developer pwn20wnd again, but given the new installation methodology and the fact that it bypasses many of the security mechanisms that jailbreak developers struggle with today, we think that this could be a big talk that could improve the jailbreak of iOS and iPadOS 15, and we just can’t wait to see what comes of it.

to uncover?

There has been no mention of Pwn20wnd working on an unc0ver jailbreak for iOS and iPadOS 15, but it will be interesting to see if he gets any juicy support from the Fugu15 material discussed above.

Honorable Mention: TrollStore

TrollStore, originally introduced by iOS developer opa334, is a permanent signature utility for iOS and iPadOS 14.0-15.1.1. With it, you can permanently install any file. ipa (iPhone app) using an exploit instead of using traditional non-published app download methods like AltStore or Sideloady that force you to re-sign these apps every seven or 365 days (depending on whether you have a free or paid account an Apple developer to sign them).

TrollStore is far from being a jailbreak, but its compatibility with iOS and iPadOS 15.0-15.1.1 is huge. This means that users can install modified apps on their devices that can do things that you could otherwise only do on a jailbroken device. In fact, some developers are already converting their jailbreak tweaks into downloadable unpublished files so you can do just that – see Legizmo Kincaid.

Moreover, opa334 believes it will be able to expand support beyond iOS and iPadOS 15.1.1 after Linus Henze releases Fugu15.

So, even though TrollStore is not a jailbreak, it is based on an exploit and allows you to change the behavior of your device with modified applications, and therefore we suggest playing with it if you are looking forward to iOS and iPadOS 15 jailbreak quit!

Conclusion

All of the above boils down to what we have repeated in almost every jailbreak-related post: there is no ETA for the iOS and iPadOS 15 jailbreak, but work is underway to make it public.

More importantly, it’s best to stay on the lowest possible firmware, because Apple is constantly adding security patches to every update, sometimes cleverly disguised as “new feature”updates, and they close vulnerabilities used for jailbreaking.

When the first jailbreak for iOS and iPadOS 15 finally comes out, we expect most teams to focus on iOS and iPadOS 16 to start a new saga of trying to hack Apple’s mobile operating system. But don’t expect anything anytime soon.