Paul Morris·

iOS 12 Makes Jailbreaking Harder Than Older Versions Of iOS

Prominent jailbreak developer @nullriver has taken to Twitter to provide insights into some of the changes Apple has made with its iOS 12 platform. In order to provide context, this information has been shared as an insight into how it could potentially be more difficult for security researchers to produce an iOS 12 jailbreak.

As far as jailbreaking goes, we have already been privy to some progress from certain prominent members of the jailbreak community.

That progress was enough to make most of the community feel like there was a great enough understanding of the platform and its vulnerabilities to potentially have a jailbreak in place not long after the maiden version of iOS 12 dropped into the public domain. That may actually still be the case but this latest information could potentially throw a spanner in the works, or, at a minimum, shows the potential difficulties that a jailbreak developer would need to overcome.

The developer’s first tweet on the subject highlighted a few things that will make “jailbreaking harder” as far as iOS 12 is concerned:

– introduction of CoreTrust: this checks that all signatures come from Apple, supposedly stopping fake signing like ldid does

– vm_map_exec_lockdown: some form of userland ktrr, coming w/ the A12 (probably, unconfirmed)

The tweet was then followed up with another, providing a little more insight into the discoveries and containing the caveat that none of the issues are showstoppers per se but that more investigation would inevitably be needed:

– symbols are completely stripped in the iOS 12 kernelcache, will make patchfinders harder to make

None of these are show stoppers however, but we’re gonna need to play with it to see how it’s all implemented. Doesn’t seem anything too drastic yet.

The information provided by @nullriver should be taken with caution at this stage and with a pinch of salt until further investigation is provided. However, it’s also a good sign that people in the community are actively looking at iOS 12 and starting to seriously think about the platform from a jailbreak perspective. As soon as any additional information is released on this topic we will be sure to let you know.

(Source: @nullriver [Twitter])

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