Security researches from Chinese company Alibaba claim to have successfully jalibroken the iPhone X running iOS 11.2.1. In a blog post, the researchers explained that they were originally able to successfully jailbreak iOS 11.2, the same jailbreak is also applicable to iOS 11.2.1, which was released just this week…
The announcement is somewhat bizarre as Song Yang, head of Alibaba’s Secure Pandora Labs, calls the jailbreak “perfect” and “different” from other recent jailbreaks. Furthermore, the jailbreak is believed to be fully untethered and supports Cydia.
Unfortunately for those still interested in jailbreaking, Pandora Labs has no plans to publicly release its findings and didn’t share too many details about the technical side, which could make it hard for others to imitate. The blog post explains that Pandora Labs was limited to “security research purposes.”
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 specific details about this jailbreak are unclear, it appears that it takes advantage of a memory buffer overflow bug to incite a kernel panic. Whether or not others would be able to imitate that and subsequently release this jailbreak remains to be seen (via 3uTools).
News of Alibaba’s successful jailbreak comes following an announcement from Google Project Zero researcher Ian Beer, who said he found a kernel vulnerability in iOS 11.1.2 that paves the way for the first iOS 11 jailbreak. While that jailbreak was limited to an outdated version of iOS, Alibaba’s founding works even on the just-released iOS 11.2.1.
Jailbreak interest has waned over recent years, but there’s still a strong community behind it. A Reddit thread concerning Alibaba’s jailbreak has accumulated over 280 comments from excited users, but it remains to be seen as to whether or not it will see the light of day.
Commenters on an earlier 9to5Mac article about Google’s Project Zero discovery outlined a few viable jailbreak use cases, such as bringing Google Maps to CarPlay and adding features like Live Photos to older devices.
Would you be interested in an iPhone X and iOS 11.2.1 jailbreak? Or are you no longer interested in jailbreaking at all? Let us know down in the comments.
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