Liang Chen of Singular Security Lab has successfully jailbroken the iOS 14.2 operating system. The hacker also showcased a video demonstrating his jailbreak at the PoC2020 conference.
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Liang Chen jailbreaks iPhone 12 Pro on iOS 14.2
Liang Chen, the director of Singular Security Lab, has successfully jailbroken iOS 14.2 update.
The Chinese security researcher showcased a demonstration video of iOS 14.2 jailbreak as a part of his “2020: a new year to research iOS security” talk.
iOS 14 is a massive update that brings a lot of security enhancements, especially at the kernel level.
The latest mobile operating system by Apple also blocks the possibility of using a fake kernel task port as an arbitrary read/write primitive.
In this presentation, the hacker sheds light on how Apple’s mitigations and security enhancements work and how hackers can bypass them.
Further, the iOS 14 update also hardens the PAC component on devices with the A12 system-on-chip or later.
Here’s the demonstration video Liang Chen presented at the Power Of Community 2020 virtual conference.
Jailbreak demonstration on iPhone 12 Pro running the latest iOS 14.2 firmware by Liang Chen (@chenliang0817)
at Singular Security Lab 🔥🔥👌. #RETWEET for visibility pic.twitter.com/v7Uc1aLKmf— Yalu Jailbreak (@Yalujb) November 13, 2020
The device in question is an iPhone 12 Pro running iOS 14.2 (18B92). The jailbreak app developed by the Singular Security Team also displays messages at each stage of the exploitation process.
After the device is jailbroken, Chen establishes an SSH session and logs in as the superuser.
Security research teams don’t usually create apps to demonstrate the inner workings of their exploits.
Liang and the Singular Security team, on the other hand, went the extra mile to develop a full-blown jailbreak application!
For what it’s worth, this is not the first time we’re hearing about an iOS 14 jailbreak. Earlier in July this year, Team Pangu demonstrated a jailbreak for the iOS 14.0 Beta update at MOSEC 2020.
Will Liang Chen make his exploit public?
Liang Chen is a renowned professional security researcher and a participant in major bug bounty programs.
For the uninitiated, Chen was also a member of the famed Tencent KeenLab security team.
He has demonstrated a wide variety of jailbreaks on the latest iOS operating systems at security conferences such as Black Hat USA, Black Hat Europe, Pwn2Own, PoC, RECon, in the past few years.
So, needless to say, the exploit used in this jailbreak will not be released to the general public. It will most likely be sold to Apple or a private player in exchange for a large chunk of money.
Here’s some good news, though – there’s a lot going on the iOS 14 front. We wouldn’t be surprised if a powerful exploit goes public in the next couple of months.
If you are interested in jailbreaking your iOS 14 device, make sure you turn off automatic updates and stay on iOS 14.1 or below.
