Paul Morris on April 30, 2018, 9:38 pm

Keen Security Lab Successfully Jailbreaks iOS 11.3.1, Includes Cydia

A team of relatively well-known security researchers has successfully managed to jailbreak Apple’s iOS 11.3 platform.

Tencent Keen Security Lab, which is made up of a number of highly capable researchers based in Shanghai, including Marco Grassi and Liang Cheng, has shown off a screenshot of Cydia running on iPhone X with iOS 11.3.1 installed.

Rather than making a huge song and dance about the work through social media platforms, the researchers at the Lab have taken a more understated approach and shared the iOS 11.3.1 jailbreak capability at this year’s Inflitrate Security Conference, which was held at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach, Florida over the last couple of days.

At the event, Lab co-founder, as well as other members of the team, talked about the iOS 11.3.1 jailbreak success in addition to a number of other interesting security-based topics.

The work has clearly been presented by the company as a proof-of-concept in order to showcase that the team has the requisite skills to break through Apple’s security and put the necessary steps in place to actually get Cydia up and running on a jailbroken device running Apple’s latest firmware.

However, as good as this is from the perspective that it shows that a jailbreak is possible on iOS 11.3.1, it’s worth noting that Keen Security Lab has prior form where jailbreaks are concerned, which means that this will likely never be turned into a public-facing jailbreak and never make it into the hands of device owners across the world.

It’s also currently unknown how much work has actually been put into this jailbreak and how functional it actually is in its current state. We’ve seen that Cydia version 1.1.30 is up and running on the liberated iPhone X but it’s unknown if that’s just a Cydia front-end or if it’s actually functioning as a fully functional package manager capable of installing tweaks, themes, and other packages.

With that said, it feels like it’s kind of a moot point considering that this will never make its way into the public domain. It remains to be seen if any additional work will be done on this jailbreak or if the team will present at any other conferences about the vulnerabilities used.