Alibaba Security Researchers Reportedly Jailbreak iOS 11.2.1

Security researchers at Alibaba claim to have successfully jailbroken the iPhone X running iOS 11.2.1.

In a blog post, the researchers said that they were originally able to jailbreak iOS 11.2, and the same jailbreak continued to work with iOS 11.2.1, which was released earlier this week. Head of Alibaba’s Secure Pandora Labs Song Yang called the jailbreak “perfect” and “different” from past jailbreaks.

The jailbreak is believed to be fully untethered, meaning that you don’t need to re-jailbreak after restarting your device, and it supports Cydia.

Unfortunately for those who are still interested in jailbreaking, Pandora Labs will not be releasing its findings and has not shared too many details on the technial side, which will make it hard for others to replicate.

“Although iOS 11.2 fixes some security issues, we confirmed the new iOS will still be jailbroken on the first day it was released. Although we escaped iOS 11.2 quickly, we were limited to security research purposes, our team won’t provide any jailbreak tool.”

While details of the jailbreak are still unclear, the incident report below indicates that program they ran got a PC (program counter) alignment exception from the kernel.

An unaligned exception may occur because some other step resulted in corrupted memory (an uninitialized or corrupt pointer). For instance, it could be due to a buffer overflow or a race condition in the code.

The news comes following an announcement from Google Project Zero researcher Ian Beer, who said he found a kernel vulnerability in iOS 11.1.2. While that first jailbreak was limited to an outdated version of iOS, Alibaba’s findings work even on the latest version of Apple’s mobile operating system.

[via iPhone Hacks]

P.S. - Like our news? Support the site with a coffee/beer. Or shop with our Amazon link. We use affiliate links when possible--thank you for supporting independent media.