Having the skillset to reverse engineer things with respect to the iPhone and iPad can be particularly valuable, especially if you’re a security researcher, developer, or advanced-level power user. But what if reverse engineering could be made easier and more approachable?
Just this week, Hyperixa released a neat little app called IPSW, which could be used to see if a particular iPhone or iPad firmware version was being signed by Apple at the time of checking. The IPSW app was first made available for jailbroken iPhones and iPads via package managers such as Cydia, Sileo, and Zebra.
One thing jailbreakers and jailbreak hopefuls must pay close attention to is their handset’s firmware. Apple intently unsigns older versions of iOS and iPadOS to prevent users from downgrading to them from newer versions — an effort that makes jailbreaking more difficult as Apple pushes software updates frequently to patch the bugs and exploits used by jailbreak tools.
Apple unleashed iOS & iPadOS 14.2 to the general public last Thursday with a plethora of new Emojis, wallpapers, and other improvements. That said, no one should be astonished to learn that the company has stopped signing the older iOS & iPadOS 14.1 firmware this Thursday evening, just one week after the aforementioned release.
The unsigning of a particular version of firmware means that iPhone and iPad users can no longer officially downgrade to it via Finder or iTunes, and that’s because these platforms depend on ‘permission’ from Apple’s servers to continue the software restore on one of these devices. Third-party workarounds exist for the daring ones, of course.
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.
We all knew it was coming, and now it’s official – iOS 12.4 is no longer being signed by Apple.
The Cupertino-based big tech company closed the signing window for iOS 12.4 late Wednesday evening, effectively preventing downgrades from the newer iOS 12.4.1 release, which was released more than two weeks ago to re-patch the Sock Puppet exploit that Apple inadvertently un-patched in iOS 12.4.
It was only within the past couple of weeks that Pwn20wnd and the Electra Team updated the unc0ver and Chimera jailbreak tools with support for iOS 12.4 by way of an updated Sock Puppet exploit, and while it was the first time in a long while that the latest version of iOS could be jailbroken, all fun things must, unfortunately, come to an end…
Apple released iOS 12.4.1 to the general public on Monday with bug fixes and security enhancements, one of which tended to the updated Sock Puppet exploit that Apple initially patched in iOS 12.3 and then inadvertently un-patched again in iOS 12.4.
Apple’s legal team filed a lawsuit against mobile device virtualization company Corellium LLC this week for purported “copyright infringement,” citing that Corellium’s business model “is based entirely on commercializing the illegal replication of the copyrighted operating system and applications that run on Apple’s iPhone, iPad, and other Apple devices.”
Corellium’s services are a valuable asset to security researchers because they enable deployment of Apple’s mobile operating system in a virtualized environment. With such a tool, hackers can research iOS vulnerabilities, and in the case of unc0ver lead developer Pwn20wnd, it can even help with jailbreak tool development by ensuring stability across all device and firmware combinations.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve likely heard about Apple’s upcoming iOS 13 for iPhone and iPod touch (iPad gets its own new operating system dubbed iPadOS), which implements native dark mode and a plethora of other jaw-dropping features that users have been requesting from Apple for quite some time. On the other hand, the oldest handsets it supports out of the box are the iPhone SE, 6s, and 6s Plus.
In a seemingly unbelievable turn of events, however, an Apple device tinkerer with the Twitter handle @NighttigerFTW has purportedly managed to get the first iOS 13 beta running on an iPhone 6 with minimal tweaking. The full details below:
Veteran jailbreakers are likely familiar with a handy utility called Cydia Eraser, which Saurik released several years ago to help jailbreakers ‘un-jailbreak’ their pwned handsets without restoring and updating their firmware via iTunes. Saurik’s busy life has prevented him from updating Cydia Eraser for modern versions of iOS, but it now looks like there could be a light at the end of the tunnel.
iOS developer Sam Gardner, perhaps better known to the community as Samg_is_a_ninja, took to /r/jailbreak this weekend to tease a spectacular project that he has been working on for nearly a year and a half, and he calls it Succession.
Apple appears to have stopped signing iOS 12.1.3 on Monday, a move on the Cupertino-based company’s part that prevents iOS device users from downgrading their device’s installed firmware from iOS 12.1.4 via iTunes.
This move doesn’t impact the jailbreak community very much because the latest jailbreakable firmware at the time of this writing is iOS 12.1.2, which Apple stopped signing more than a month ago. That said, the jailbreak community isn’t particularly rushing to downgrade to iOS 12.1.3 these days.
We've always been able to downgrade to a recent iOS version by installing an IPSW file on an iPhone or iPad through iTunes for Mac and Windows, but that's no longer possible in the latest iTunes 12.9 beta, distributed last week as part of the macOS Mojave 10.14.4 developer beta.