Paul Morris on January 20, 2018, 2:10 am

iOS 11.2.2 Jailbreak Update: What Happens After Apple Makes Software Update With chaiOS Patch Public?

It doesn’t take long for the jailbreak community to move forward and start thinking about what’s next. Tools like Electra, which support jailbreaking iOS 11.0 through iOS 11.1.2, have only been with us for a relatively tiny amount of time, but already the community is wondering about the possibility of iOS 11.2.2 jailbreak.

So, with that in mind, we ask ourselves what the landscape looks like in that respect?

First and foremost, thanks to a public post by CoolStar – the developer behind Electra jailbreak toolkit – we already know that most of the patches used in Electra offer compatibility with iOS 11.2.2. That means the majority of the important inclusions, as well as the underlying code used to put Electra together, can be ported across to offer compatibility with iOS 11.2.2, which was Apple’s latest firmware released to fix Spectre vulnerabilities.

We also know that the missing ingredient is an exploit on iOS 11.2.2 which can be leveraged to execute the jailbreak process. The Electra developer also used some interesting terminology in his tweets. The use of the word “yet” when referencing an iOS 11.2.2 exploit could have been taken as a suggestion that he knows something that the rest of us don’t know.

We also know that Alibaba Pandora Labs have previously shown off a jailbreak on iOS 11.2.1, with Apple’s iOS 11.2.2 Security Content making no reference whatsoever to any of those exploits being patched with the release of iOS 11.2.2. It is, therefore, reasonable to assume that the exploits used are still alive and well and therefore accessible on devices running iOS 11.2.2. However, given what we know about Alibaba, it’s also reasonable to assume that those exploits will be kept private and nothing will be released.

With all of that in mind, Apple is expected to push out a new version of iOS sometime during next week. This will be released as either iOS 11.2.3 or iOS 11.2.5 – the latter of which is currently in beta – and will contain a selection of bug fixes, including a patch for the much talked about chaiOS Messages app bug.

It stands to reason that if any activity is going to happen in the jailbreak world where iOS 11.2.2 is concerned, then it will happen right after Apple releases that firmware. This is one of those “wait and see” situations. Let’s keep our fingers crossed and hope that we get to see something pop up once iOS 11.2.3/11.2.5 is made public next week.