Apple’s all set to release iOS 8, the biggest ever update to iOS tomorrow, September 17th. While the release contains a number of features that have been inspired from jailbreak apps and tweaks, there’ll still be a number of reasons you would want to jailbreak iOS 8.
So here’s an update on the iOS 8 jailbreak.
Security researcher and hacker Stefan Essar aka i0n1c said back in June that many exploits that were used to jailbreak iOS 7.1.1 remain unpatched in iOS 8 betas, but it remains to be seen if the public release of iOS 8 continues to have these exploits unpatched. i0n1c additionally said that he’ll patch his iOS 7.1.1 jailbreak called Cyberelevat0r to work with iOS 8, but we doubt he has any intentions of releasing it to the public.
Download finished. Initial tests show that iOS 8 beta does not fix anything. Dumped kernel fine, but code changed and patches are not found.
— Stefan Esser (@i0n1c) June 2, 2014
I guess tomorrow I need a few hours in the office to fix the code and then the JB should be iOS 8 beta compatible.
— Stefan Esser (@i0n1c) June 2, 2014
In June, BlackGeek, developer of Geeksn0w, the tethered jailbreak for iOS 7.1.1 for iPhone 4, teased an unofficial version of Pangu that claimed to work with iOS 8. He added that he planned to release this unofficial version to jailbreak iOS 8 beta, but didn’t end up releasing it.
I just leave this here pic.twitter.com/JP5l7qTo31
— BlackGeek (@blackgeektuto) June 24, 2014
Earlier this month, a user on reddit claimed to have successfully jailbroken iOS 8 by patching the Pangu 1.2.x binary. As a proof, the w0rldello posted screenshots of the Pangu app icon along with the redesigned iOS 8 Control Center, as well as the Pangu Mac app showing an iPhone 5s contacted that is running iOS 8. This suggests that many exploits remained unpatched in iOS 8 beta 5, but the concern is that if these vulnerabilities would remain present in iOS the final public version of iOS 8.
Apple has fixed a lot of ‘backdoor’ surveillance and forensics vulnerabilities in iOS 8 Golden Master that were reported by iPhone jailbreak expert and forensic scientist Jonathan Zdziarski. This included a network packet sniffer and File Relay that could be used to extract private data out of iOS devices. We’re not sure if these vulnerabilities will have any impact on the progress of an iOS 8 jailbreak, as they seem to be more about privacy.
The Pangu team has in the past said that they’ll continue to release jailbreaks in the future without worrying about the risk of burning exploits. They demonstrated then when they swapped out i0n1c’s exploit for their own exploit to jailbreak an already jailbroken version of iOS.
The evad3rs team and the Pangu team have been surprisingly quiet about an iOS 8 jailbreak. It’s likely they do not want to make any comments before the public release of iOS 8, but we hope we get an update from them once it is released.
As always, we’ll let you know as soon as we’ve any more information. Don’t forget to join our Facebook Fan page, follow us on Twitter, add us to your circles on Google+, subscribe to our RSS feed or our Daily Newsletter for the latest updates on the iOS 8 jailbreak.
