Paul Morris on November 21, 2017, 9:57 pm

iOS 10.3.1 Jailbreak Takes Another Step Towards Release

Adam Donenfeld, a security researcher at Zimperium and an increasingly popular iOS exploit-finder, has set tongues wagging in the jailbreak community once again with a tweet regarding iOS 10.3.1 and his previously released ziVA exploits.

Donenfeld’s tweet has confirmed that his well-known ZiVA exploits are now up and running on 64-bit devices running iOS 10.3.1 after a small amount of work at his end to bypass some internal changes made by Apple.

Donenfeld took the opportunity to release ziVA into the community and talk about it in more detail back in August of this year with a dedicated talk titled “Ro(o)tten Apples: Vulnerability Heaven in the iOS Sandbox” at the Hack in the Box conference in Singapore.

The privilege escalation vulnerabilities released were discovered and put together by Donenfeld and his highly capable team at Zimperium, with the aforementioned presentation an opportunity to talk about the work involved, the outcome, what it means for the future of jailbreaking, and, finally, to publish the exploits to GitHub for further investigation and use by other security researchers with an interest in iOS or mobile.

Things have been relatively quiet on this front since then, until now, with his latest tweet kickstarting the chain of excitement for those who have been sitting patiently on iOS 10.3.1 waiting for a jailbreak to be released:

I’m not sure if a coincidence or not, but on iOS 10.3.1, my sysctl trick to bypass SMAP was “challenged”. Apple switched the order of l1dcache and l1icache… so now the whole exploit is a little bit more messed up. Anyway… ZiVA runs on 10.3.1 🙂

Most of that will fly immediately over the head of most iOS device users sitting on iOS 10.3.1 and staying away from the draws of iOS 11. However, the end of the tweet confirms that “ZiVA runs on 10.3.1,” which is the type of information that most people are looking for.

The tweet gives good news but still doesn’t go into details on when, or if, the jailbreak would arrive for public. However, any little or big progress made is good news at the moment for the jailbreak community.

(Source: @doadam [Twitter])