It’s officially Sunday October 24th, and as many avid jailbreakers-at-heart have been waiting for, security researcher Linus Henze has made good on a promise to release an untether that supports up to and including iOS & iPadOS 14.5.1 right out of the box despite a minor postponement this week that was intended to resolve a few bugs prior to releasing.
A small update surfaced this Tuesday evening for everyone that has been avidly looking forward to the public release of Linus Henze’s jailbreak untether for iOS & iPadOS 14.5.1 and below.
If you’ve had your eyes glued to jailbreak community developments amid all the talk of untethers recently, then you’re not alone, and we’re especially excited to share that you’re in for some good news.
Excitement is swirling around in the jailbreak community Monday evening after hacker and iOS developer @__spv took to Twitter to share thought-provoking Tweets related to untethered jailbreaks.
Untethered jailbreaks are something of a rarity these days, with most modern jailbreaks being either semi-tethered or semi-untethered variants instead. But a teaser by security researcher Linus Henze just one week ago manifested at least some hope that the community could witness one again soon, at least for the likes of iOS & iPadOS 14.5.1 and below.
And speaking of untethered jailbreaks, Odyssey Team lead developer CoolStar announced via the Sileo / Taurine / Odyssey Discord channel Monday evening that they had successfully achieved arbitrary code execution in a native iOS/iPadOS application after conducting a full reboot of the device. This is, of course, the hallmark feature of an untethered jailbreak.
For the past several years, the overwhelming majority of jailbreaks have been semi-untethered, meaning that you could still use a handset hacked liberated by said tools after a reboot, albeit in a non-jailbroken state.
The lack of untethered jailbreaks — or those that remain fully jailbroken following a reboot — has been a pain point for jailbreakers for as long as anyone can remember. For that reason, a Tweet shared by @LinusHenze Monday afternoon might be of particular interest…
Apple’s upcoming iOS & iPadOS 14 software updates aren’t slated to be released until sometime this Fall, but that hasn’t stopped prominent jailbreak community hackers from getting their hands dirty with the developer pre-releases and working their usual magic.
The first example of an iOS 14 jailbreak was shared by the checkra1n team mere days after Apple teased the update at WWDC 2020, but this was expected as checkra1n utilizes a hardware-based bootrom exploit that can’t be patched with a software update. Early this morning, however, the Pangu Team took the stage at Mosec 2020 to demonstrate a working jailbreak of their own on the iOS 14 platform.
If you’ve been poking around in the jailbreak community for as long as I have, then you’ve undoubtedly witnessed a plethora of different jailbreak types. Among the most popular in this community are untethered, semi-untethered, semi-tethered, and tethered, each of which exhibit different attributes that every jailbreaker should be aware of.
We understand that some are new to jailbreaking, but even those who’ve been around as long as I have might have some confusion between the different types. For this reason, we’ve compiled a quick guide to help everyone understand what each of these different jailbreaks are and how they behave.
While there’s been a lot of news encompassing progress on the iOS 12 jailbreak as of late, that hasn’t hindered third-party iOS 11-centric projects from making historic progress. One of the latest involves an untethered jailbreak for handsets running iOS 11.x.
Indeed, while it might seem too good to be true at first glance, iOS developer Jake Blair Tweeted a demonstration video from YouTube Monday afternoon showcasing his “spicy” untethered jailbreak on what appears to be an unknown iteration of iPad mini:
The jailbreak community has been anything but quiet lately. We’ve seen things ranging from jailbreaking the new flagship iPhone XS Max, to updating untethered bootrom exploits for the legacy iPhone 3GS, to releasing a new jailbreak tool for firmware 1.1 on the original iPod touch; and now, something else of interest has surfaced.
In a curious video shared by YouTube user doras2 over the weekend, we discern what appears to be a fully-untethered jailbreak running on a 32-bit iPhone 5 handset with iOS 10.2.1 installed on it:
Apple released iOS 12 to the public Monday afternoon, and not even one full day after release, security firms have begun teasing untethered jailbreaks on the new mobile firmware.
The latest proof-of-concept video comes by way of Ali Security. Shown below, it demonstrates the process of the firm’s in-house jailbreak tool:
Security researchers from Alibaba’s Pandora Lab claim to have created a new jailbreak compatible with Apple’s latest flagship: the iPhone X. Furthermore, it appears to work flawlessly with iOS 11.2.1, which Apple just released to the public this week.
A blog post by Alibaba notes how the jailbreak isn’t semi-untethered like those released by Pangu and Luca Todesco in the last two years. Instead, it’s of the untethered variety, which means one could reboot the jailbroken device and continue using third-party add-ons without re-running the jailbreak tool on a computer.