Jailbreak Hacker Planetbeing: “It’s Likely” Jailbreaking iOS 7 Will Be Harder

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planetbeing1

planetbeing — the famed hacker who is part of the team behind the latest iOS 6 jailbreak — is now taking part in a Reddit AMA, answering questions posed to him by the community.

Although the AMA has just begun, Planetbeing has already opined on the future of iOS jailbreaking… and he says that while it’s too early to be sure, his belief is that iOS 7 will be a much tougher nut to crack than iOS 6.

Asked about how he feels the future of jailbreaking looks based on how long Evasi0n took to release, planetbeing said:

It’s hard to say. Apple has successfully mitigated many vectors of attack in iOS 6. In this current jailbreak, we “evaded” Apple’s mitigations in the userland with several vulnerabilities I would perhaps characterize as “lame”, since these mistakes are a throwback to earlier days of iOS jailbreaking where we primarily used filesystem tricks. We only attacked Apple’s hardened security head-on in the kernel. “Lame” vulnerabilities tend to be hard to find, however, so it’s likely the next jailbreak will be tougher. That said, we also retain a few tricks that may or may not help in the future. Who knows what the weight of each factor should be when trying to determine how long the next jailbreak will take.

That sounds about right. Last week, we did the math and, based upon historic releases, estimated that it would take the jailbreak community more than six months to jailbreak the next version of iOS. There’s always the possibility that Apple will let a major vulnerability slide though, but with every release, iOS becomes a trickier nut to crack. I doubt jailbreaking will ever totally go away, but amateur jailbreaking just might.

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