Well that was fast. The iPhone X has been jailbroken after just a week on the market, which means the brand new A11 Bionic chip does have vulnerabilities that can be exploited to offer users a jailbreak. That must be very exciting for iPhone owners who still want to enjoy a jailbroken iOS experience, and who weren’t sure whether or not to upgrade to the latest iPhone. But we will remind you that the same A11 Bionic chip is found inside the iPhone 8, which means hackers have had plenty of time to study it since September. But it’s important to note that it’s one thing to jailbreak iOS 11 on older hardware, and something else to crack Apple’s brand new handset.
The jailbreak was demoed at POC2017 in Seoul, South Korea, on an iPhone X that was running the recently released iOS 11.1.1 patch. The first company to have successfully cracked the iPhone X security is KeenLab, RedmondPie reports.
However, that’s not one of the companies that release newly discovered jailbreaks into the wild. KeenLab’s Liang Chen did not disclose anything about the vulnerabilities discovered in the iPhone X, and the company may end up selling the exploit to the highest bidder or even to Apple, using the company’s own Bug Bounty Program.
KeenLab demoed jailbreaks for iOS 11 betas and iOS 10.3.2, the report notes, without releasing any public tools for jailbreak fans.
That said, others are already hard at work on jailbreaking the iPhone X, including the usual suspects who release jailbreak tools to the public in the past. But the fact that the first A11 Bionic jailbreak is already here means that jailbreaking the iPhone X and iPhone 8 is clearly possible.
