Paul Morris on June 13, 2018, 10:47 pm

iOS 11.4 Gets Jailbroken With Working Cydia [Video]

Security researcher and 2018 Pwn2Own champion, Richard Zhu, has teased a video which shows a jailbroken device running Apple’s latest iOS 11.4 release. While the world waits on an Electra update offering iOS 11.3.1 support, Zhu is showing off a liberated version of iOS 11.4.

For a lot of individuals in the jailbreak community, there is an immediate question about whether or not Richard Zhu is actually a legitimate authority when it comes to security research and whether or not he is capable of putting together a jailbreak of this magnitude.

Zhu may not be extremely well-known in the community but the fact that he is the 2018 Pwn2Own champion, found serious vulnerabilities in Microsoft Edge and Firefox, and was given $120,000 in reward money for his findings, should be enough information to convince even the most skeptical that this jailbreak is legitimate.

Legitimate the jailbreak may be, but whether or not it will be released into the community is another story altogether. The video itself starts off by showing that the device is running the latest available firmware with iOS 11.4 already installed. It then moves to Cydia, showing the app icon on the Springboard and then showing Cydia being loaded, albeit with errors. Zhu then dives into the Terminal app on the device and pumps in a few commands to show that the device does indeed have root access thanks to the payload within the jailbreak.

Given how quickly that this has been put together, it would be logical to assume that Zhu has been working on putting together a jailbreak for earlier versions of iOS, with the main exploits still applicable in iOS 11.4, which has allowed for this video to be shared so quickly.

The question here definitely isn’t whether the jailbreak is legitimate but whether or not it will ever see the light of day given that we very little about Zhu and that he has provided no additional information about the solution, including whether or not he has any intention to share it with the world.

For now, we need to remain positive about the fact that it’s now been proven that iOS 11.4 can be liberated. We also need to wait to see if anything comes of this or if it’s just a demonstration of his own capabilities.