iOS & iPadOS 18 launched this Monday, marking a significant milestone in the Cupertino-based Apple’s software update process. This major update brought with it a significant amount of highly requested features and enhanced the user experiences of iPhones and iPads alike.
But for those who jailbreak their iPhones and iPads, iOS & iPadOS 18 conveyed something a bit more sinister – the chilling reality that there still isn’t a public jailbreak available for non-checkm8 bootrom exploit-vulnerable iPhones and iPads running Apple’s previous firmware – iOS & iPadOS 17.
Indeed, many of us are marching into new territory to take advantage of the latest and greatest new features in iOS & iPadOS 18, but for those who’ve followed the cardinal rule of staying on the lowest possible firmware and avoiding software updates in order to keep their device as vulnerable as possible for exploitation and jailbreaking, these users are now up to two firmware generations behind the rest of the world.
At this time, the latest available jailbreak for iPhones and iPads of the arm64e variety (A12 and newer) is Dopamine, a rootless jailbreak that supports iOS & iPadOS 15.0-16.5.1 on these devices. Dopamine can also jailbreak arm64 devices (A11 and older), but the checkm8 bootrom exploit-based palera1n jailbreak supports more firmware versions; it’s merely limited by the antiquated hardware that it runs on.
Dopamine project lead developer Lars Fröder reminded us of this chilling reality in a post shared to X (formerly Twitter) early Wednesday morning, shown above.
“With iOS 18, for the first time in history, a new iOS major release dropped without there being a single public kernel exploit for the previous one (iOS 17),” Fröder stated.
And he’s not wrong. The last time we even reported on anything kernel exploit-related was when Kernel File Descriptor (KFD) was all the rage, and it only supported up to and including certain versions of iOS & iPadOS 16. We haven’t really seen anything like it since, especially not for iOS & iPadOS 17, and it remains to be seen if anybody is sitting on an exploit that works on iOS or iPadOS 18.
Apple has largely motivated security researchers to report bugs directly to the company instead of publicly releasing them through its Apple Security Bounty program, in which Apple pays out rewards to security researchers for discovering exploits and helping the company patch them in software update releases. This program de-motivates public releases because of the monetary reward that accompanies not doing so.
Does this mean that we’ll never see a kernel exploit ever again? Absolutely not. It just means they’ll be a lot fewer and farther in between. This is also obviously another hurdle for jailbreaking, so those hoping for one are again reminded to stay on the lowest possible firmware and avoid software updates as to prevent security patches from being installed and closing exploits that may help with jailbreaking in the future.
What version of iOS or iPadOS are you running currently? Let us know in the comments section down below.