A zero day exploit has been discovered in iOS 11.3, which could potentially help hackers in developing a jailbreak for the operating system. The revelation about exploit’s existence was made by @SparkZheng on Twitter. Zheng works as Senior Security Engineer for iOS and Android at Chinese company Alibaba. Alibaba has previously demoed an iOS 11.2.1 jailbreak without releasing it.
For those of you who are not aware, a zero day exploit is an exploit in software that was not known previously and is currently not known to the people responsible of patching them, in this case Apple’s software team.
Not much about this particular exploit is known or has been made public. All we know is that it exists and may or may not become available to developers who develop jailbreaks for iOS. We also can’t be certain if this exploit is enough to create an iOS 11.3 jailbreak on its own.
Even though major iOS exploits are hard to come by, even when they are discovered by security researchers they tend to report them to Apple to take advantage of its bounty program or sell them to third-parties who pay big bucks to acquire this information. This has caused iOS jailbreaks much harder to create, resulting in lost user interest in the concept of iOS jailbreaking.
Current iOS 11.1.2 jailbreak is based on the zero day exploit that was made public by Google Project Zero’s Ian Beer. That particular exploit was published because Apple had already fixed it in subsequent iOS releases.
What will happen to this particular iOS 11.3 exploit is anyone’s guess. We will keep an eye out and report on further developments.
