Paul Morris on June 23, 2017, 4:55 pm

iOS 11 Beta Gets Jailbroken!

We are still months away from a public release of iOS 11 but that hasn’t stopped passionate and enthusiastic security researchers from liberating Apple’s latest major iteration of iOS.

In what is most definitely another turn in the huge cat and mouse game between Apple and the jailbreak community, a group of security researchers has shown off a functional jailbreak on the latest iOS 11 beta 2 firmware at this year’s MOSEC (Mobile Security Conference) 2017 in Shanghai, China.

A tweet coming from the Twitter account of Min Zheng – who is highlighted as a Senior Security Engineer at Alibaba – has shown a new jailbreak tool being executed on iOS 10.3.2 and the latest iOS 11 beta. The user-interface of the jailbreak tool in action attributes the software to “Liang Chen of Tencent Keen Lab,” and shows the jailbreak in varying states on different devices running different firmware. One of those devices is running Apple’s latest iOS 11 beta 2.

The first thing to remember here is that this is nothing more than a demonstration at this stage for the security research industry.

We typically find that those with a vested interest in the mobile device and platform security actually go through the process of liberating platforms like iOS to show what is possible. That generally gets the industry excited, and also raises the excitement levels of those with an iOS device, but with no actual guarantees that it will ultimately lead into a public-facing jailbreak of any kind.

It’ll be extremely interesting to see how this one progresses and whether or not the vulnerabilities and exploits used actually make their way into the hands of individuals who have a proven history of putting them to good use to furnish the jailbreak community with a functional jailbreak.

With that said, we are currently only sitting on a second public beta of iOS 11 with approximately three months to go before we see a final public release. It simply doesn’t make sense for anyone to release anything at this stage in the process for iOS 11 and let Apple patch any potential exploits prior to that September release.

We have no idea what the jailbreak community has in store for us going forward, but suffice to say that excitement levels have just been ramped up a few notches now that we know it is possible to liberate iOS 11 beta and iOS 10.3.2.