Check out the latest news and tutorials about checkm8, a hardware-based bootrom exploit for A7-A11 iPhones and iPads that can’t be patched by Apple, making it a popular choice for jailbreak tools.
Hacker and checkra1n jailbreak team member Luca Todesco turned quite a few heads Sunday evening after posting a rather peculiar Tweet that appeared to tease substantial progress on an iOS 14 jailbreak.
The Tweet, embedded below, states “popped 14 so to celebrate I got a new pfp (profile picture).”
If you follow the checkra1n team closely on Twitter and you pay attention to the our news pieces as the team releases updates to the tool, then you’d probably come to assume that you can’t run the checkra1n jailbreak unless you have a Mac or a computer running Linux. While the aforementioned state is still technically true, you can use a helpful utility called bootra1n to run the checkra1n jailbreak on your Windows PC.
While it takes a little more finesse than simply running the checkra1n application on a Mac or a Linux box, using bootra1n is a great way to get jailbroken if you don’t have access to either of the above. In this tutorial, we’ll be showing you how to go about it, step by step.
Upon refreshing the /r/jailbreak subreddit Wednesday evening, many jailbreakers were pleasantly surprised to learn about the release of a novel jailbreak-centric utility dubbed Inferius by @marijuanARM.
After a quick scan of the release notes on the project’s official GitHub page, it becomes apparent that Inferius was created to aid users in the process of creating and restoring from custom IPSW files. Quite the attention-grabbing feat indeed, but you’ll definitely want to read more about Inferius before you start jumping right in.
It was a pleasant surprise waking up this morning to learn that the Pangu Team had successfully pwned iOS 14 using their own proprietary exploits and demoed it at the Mosec 2020 conference. Although this jailbreak in particular isn’t likely to be released, it shows that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel despite Apple’s ongoing efforts to snuff out jailbreaking once and for all.
But an iOS 14 jailbreak wasn’t the only thing that the Pangu Team shared during their presentation. Team member @windknown also discussed details encompassing security research with Apple’s proprietary SEP (Secure Enclave Processor) chips, which are used for storing valuable data including Face ID & Touch ID information and passcode data, among other things of utmost confidentiality.
It was only a couple of days ago that Apple unveiled iOS and iPadOS 14 during the company’s WWDC 2020 keynote. Shortly after that, Apple launched its first developer beta of the updated mobile operating systems, allowing developers to go hands-on with the new features and prepare their apps for the update before it launches sometime this Fall.
While iOS and iPadOS 14 snagged a ton of features from the jailbreak community as Apple does every year with each substantial release, it doesn’t seem like jailbreaking will be going anywhere any time soon. In a Tweet shared late last night, checkra1n team co-developer Dany Lisiansky shared a teaser screenshot of the checkra1n jailbreak on the first iOS 14 beta:
The unc0ver jailbreak is about to be updated to version 5.0.0 with official support for all devices that can run iOS and iPadOS 13.5, and in a silent and rather unexpected undercut, the checkra1n team released v0.10.2 beta of its bootrom exploit-based jailbreak tool for macOS Saturday evening with official support for iOS and iPadOS 13.5.
According to the release notes for the updated version of the checkra1n jailbreak, v0.10.2 not only adds support for Apple’s latest mobile firmware versions, but also incorporates a few different bug fixes at that:
Apple released iOS 13.4.1 to the general public yesterday, and as you might come to expect, this has a few implications for the jailbreak community. Obviously, the unc0ver jailbreak doesn’t support the new firmware, as it can only jailbreak iOS 13.0-13.3. Checkra1n users, on the other hand, should be in the clear following a new update to the jailbreak tool on Wednesday.
Checkra1n co-developer Jamie Bishop took to Twitter this evening to share that checkra1n v0.10.1 had been released. This new update incorporates support for iOS/iPadOS 13.4 & 13.4.1, enabling handsets susceptible to the checkm8 bootrom exploit (A7-A11) to be jailbroken even on Apple’s latest and greatest software updates:
The checkra1n jailbreak is driven by a powerful bootrom exploit that can’t be patched with a software update from Apple, and with that in mind, it’s easy to see why some people may opt to use checkra1n over some of the other jailbreaks available, such as unc0ver for example.
While it’s a great jailbreak, Windows users have relentlessly expressed dissatisfaction about having to borrow friends’ Macs or run Linux on their machines. With no certain ETA for a Windows-based checkra1n release, third parties are now cooking up interesting solutions. One is Ra1nbox, a small and portable box powered by a NanoPi Neo2 that can be used to deploy the checkra1n jailbreak from anywhere without the need for a computer.
We’ve witnessed a plethora of teasers from Pwn20wnd and the rest of team unc0ver throughout the past week. That said, it might come off as somewhat of a surprise that the checkra1n team launched an updated public beta version of the checkra1n jailbreak Wednesday afternoon, seemingly out of the blue.
The announcement, shared first by checkra1n team member Luca Todesco, denoted that the latest version of the checkra1n jailbreak tool would be v0.9.8.1 and that it would incorporate substantial changes:
The checkra1n team is best known for their checkm8 bootrom exploit-based checkra1n jailbreak tool, which just yesterday picked up support for Linux after being macOS-only for several months. We’ve known for quite some time that the checkra1n team intended to delve into more than just jailbreaking with the checkm8 bootrom exploit, and the fruits of such research are finally starting to surface.
The checkra1n team took to Twitter early Thursday morning to announce the initial release of PongoKit, a highly experimental and developer-only SDK that should help permit the deployment of other platforms on checkm8 vulnerable iOS devices:
The checkra1n team updated the checkm8 bootrom exploit-based checkra1n jailbreak tool to version 0.9.8 beta on Wednesday with a plethora of changes, including full-fledged Linux support for the very first time.
The exciting announcement was shared early this morning in a Tweet shared via Twitter, which revealed only a small amount of context:
Checkra1n has long enjoyed its prestigious status of being the first and only jailbreak tool to take advantage of the checkm8 bootrom exploit, but could that change in the near future?
A curious new posting shared just this evening on /r/jailbreak appears to detail a new jailbreak tool dubbed Fugu that is being dubbed the “first open-source jailbreak tool based on the checkm8 exploit” by its creator Linus Henze. This eye-popping development certainly grabbed our attention, but a closer look at the project's GitHub page reveals the fine print: