iOS 9 Jailbreakabke- says K33n Jailbreak Team

iOS 9 has been unveiled a few days ago at the 2015 WWDC by Apple, but evidently, the company is not the only one working on this latest OS. Hacking teams from China too have their eyes set upon iOS 9 and its official release, and if reports are to be trusted, they are on their way to find an untethered jailbreak for the OS and release it after Apple makes the iOS 9 available for public download.

Image : iOS 9 Jailbreak Progress by Keen Jailbreak Team

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For those who don’t yet know, jailbreaking is a type of hack which, when applied to an iPhone, iPod, or iPad, lets you install all types of applications even from third-part stores. This feature is natively not possible in the default iOS devices.

New Jailbreakers on the Block :

The K33n Jailbreak Team (pronounced as Keen) have a bunch of members who are very well practiced with iOS coding, which is evident from their feat at the 2013 and 2014 Pwn2Own competitions, where they bagged around $70,000 as a reward for cracking iPhones. But these Chinese hackers are rather more interested in tougher challenges than just playing with codes for money.

The Keen team is said to be working together with another renowned jailbreaker group from China, the Pangu team, which is popular for releasing the iOS 7 and iOS 8 jailbreaks. The Keen team is surely taking a challenging step by working on a jailbreak for iOS 9 and finishing it on time before the official release of the OS for the public in fall. The task is exciting but much more difficult, especially for Team K33n, as this is their first attempt at an iOS jailbreak.

Image : Keen Jailbreak Member James Fang

The challenge is to find a lot of vulnerabilities and bugs in the operating system that Apple is unaware of yet, and link all those bugs together to create an untethered jailbreak. As per a report from ‘Forbes’, three to six of such ‘zero-day’ attacks are needed typically to obtain a jailbreak that can access the roots of the iPhone and take over it and can work after rebooting too, which eliminates the need for the user to plug the device to the computer after every reboot; that’s why it is called an ‘untethered’ jailbreak.

In the meanwhile, Apple too is searching constantly for such security issues that could possibly be exploited for jailbreaks and malicious purposes.

Before the WWDC 2015 event, it was reported that OS X EL Capitan and iOS 9 would carry a “RootLess“‘ feature, which would protect the device from any jailbreak. If this is true, then the bars of challenges have been raised for the Keen Team. Apple itself has not yet talked about this ‘rootless’ technology, but a recent discovery has been made in Xcode 7 that surely Apple has a plan ready for users which would allow them to install their own apps on the Apple devices without downloading them through the App store.

Video : K33n Team speaks at Pwn2Own

Every time in the past when a jailbreak came out, Apple found out the security loops in its OS and patched those vulnerabilities, thus making it harder and more challenging for hackers to find other bugs and reenable the jailbreaks. So let’s see how the Keen Team, with Team Pangu backing them, manages to find a way to a successful iOS 9 jailbreak. Though the Keen Team is not really so ‘keen’ on working with TaiG, another Chinese hacker group, which brought out the untethered jailbreak for iOS 8.2 recently. Liang Chen, a member of K33n, stated in a ‘Forbes’ interview that they plan to release the iOS 9 untethered jailbreak just after Apple releases the iOS 9 for the public this autumn. He also told that the team will keep the vulnerabilities unrevealed for hacking contests in the future, or might hand it over to bug bounty companies. He might inform Apple first in some cases.

All we can do right now is to wait for another confirmation from the K33n team regarding their progress with the jailbreak.

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