Paul Morris on January 6, 2018, 9:08 pm

iOS 11 / 11.1.2 Jailbreak With Cydia: Saurik Gives Progress Update For Substrate Compatibility, More

Jay Freeman, also-known-as saurik, the godfather of jailbreaking, has provided a very lengthy statement regarding the current state of Substrate and Cydia compatibility with iOS 11.

Over the last few weeks, the jailbreak community has benefited from a plethora of activity which has resulted in a number of jailbreak tools being pushed out for consideration. Some of those tools have been offered for 32-bit devices running iOS 10.3.x, and some for 64-bit devices on the same firmware. We’ve even had liberation of iOS 11 through to iOS 11.1.2, which would normally be great news save for the fact that they don’t come with Cydia and Substrate support because they both aren’t compatible with iOS 11 just yet.

It has previously been said that Jay Freeman was actually working with a well-known developer in the community to bring iOS 11 compatibility to Cydia and Substrate. It was initially thought that the developer in question was CoolStar, who by the way later denied working with saurik, and now given the fact that this lengthy retort was partially in reply to a CoolStar tweet, we can only surmise that there’s another well-known jailbreak developer assisting who will be credited when the project goes live in what saurik is calling a “surprise reveal.”

The post itself is extremely long and doesn’t necessarily give any real timescales on when this will be released but does confirm that he has been working hard with the unnamed developer to put something in place for iOS 11-11.1.2 jailbreak. It also confirms that he has taken a different direction to the “jailbreakd” route that CoolStar and others seem so excited about, claiming that the “architecture without “jailbreakd” is much cleaner.”

The architecture without the “jailbreakd” is much cleaner: it means that there isn’t some weird coordination boundary halfway between Substrate and the jailbreak; and the runtime stability will be a lot better: what people seem to want “jailbreakd” to do involves walking through data structures in the kernel–without the locks required to do that, and in a “slow” manner from userspace (increasing the likelihood of various race conditions)–every time processes spawn and Subtrate has to manage code injection.

Freeman then says that he is “almost done” and that he has had to do most of the work himself as the talented individuals who actually work on exploit development have almost all left the scene. You can read his statement in full below:

As always, as and when a clear path to release becomes apparent, we’ll be sure to let you know.