by Oleg Afonin, Mobile Product Specialist at ElcomSoft

Jailbreaking iOS is becoming increasingly difficult, especially considering the amounts of money Apple and independent bug hunters are paying for discovered vulnerabilities that could lead to a working exploit. Late last year, a bug hunter at Google’s Project Zero discovered one such vulnerability and developed and published an exploit that gave birth to a plethora of jailbreak tools for all versions of iOS 10 as well as iOS 11.0 through 11.1.2. The newly emerged jailbreaks are all exploiting the same vulnerability. Moreover, they are all using the same off-the-shelf exploit to jailbreak the device. However, there are major differences between the newly emerged jailbreaks that are worth explaining.

Why Jailbreak?

Mobile forensic experts use jailbreaks for a different reason compared to enthusiast users. Jailbreaking, or obtaining root-level access to the file system, is a required pre-requisite for most physical acquisition tasks as it…