While there hasn’t been any discernible movement lately with respect to jailbreaking iOS & iPadOS 15, the good news is that a lot of different potential exploits now exist in the wild, putting the ball instead in jailbreak developers’ courts. In fact, it seems that another could be on the brink of development at the time of this writing.
On Saturday, hacker Justin Shermantook to Twitterto show off what appears to be a working kernel exploit supporting iOS & iPadOS 15.2, albeit with a particularly low success rate of just 0.02%due to Apple’s security mitigations.
Citing the screenshot included in Sherman’s original Tweet, the exploit was used on an iPhone 8 (iPhone 10,4) running iOS 15.2. Sherman said that the exploit had been reported to Apple about a month ago, however he went on to explain that he doesn’t know when or if Apple will get around to patching the exploit in a future software update since they work slowly.
While a 0.02% success rate is particularly bad and likely unusable for the purposes ofjailbreakingin its current state, it’s worth mentioning that exploit success rates can be improved with optimization. For example, Pwn20wnd repeatedlyoptimized older exploitsused by theunc0verjailbreak to enhance the success rates for end users. This could also be possible with Sherman’s exploit, however this hasn’t been confirmed.
Sherman isn’t new to the iPhone and iPad hacking game; in fact, hepublished notesabout an exploit supporting up to and including iOS & iPadOS 14.7 at the end of November for a subset of devices. It seems unlikely that this one will be used for jailbreaking, as the unc0ver jailbreak insteadpicked up support for a different exploitprovided by security researcher@pattern_f_.
We will continue to follow Sherman’s work along with any other iOS & iPadOS 15-centric security research developments, so keep it tuned to iDownloadBlog to stay up to date.
