Despite iOS 7 being the most successful mobile OS update ever, there’s still one question that everyone’s asking: When can we expect to download an iOS 7 jailbreak for the iPhone and iPad? This is a tricky question with a tricky combination of possible answers. If you have an iPhone 4, there is already a preliminary jailbreak for iOS 7, and an early port of Cydia — but neither of them are ready to use or available to download. If you own a newer iDevice, though, such as the iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, iPhone 5S, iPad, or iPad Mini (anything with the A5 SoC or newer), there is every chance that you will never be able to download an iOS 7 jailbreak.
Before we dive in and discuss why there’s no iOS 7 jailbreak for newer iDevices, and why there may never be an untethered jailbreak, we should discuss the issue of websites purporting to provide an iOS 7 jailbreak. All of these websites are fakes or scams. When (if) iOS 7 is eventually jailbroken on the iPhone 4S, 5, 5S, iPad, and iPad Mini, we will update this story to let you know. Until then, you should avoid any and all websites offering to jailbreak your iOS 7 device. Now, let’s jump into some low-level details of iOS, iPhone, and iPad jailbreaking, and discuss when we’ll see a Redsn0w or Evasi0n jailbreak for download.
Finding an exploit
Irrespective of the device or operating system — Windows PCs, Android smartphones, iOS tablets — every jailbreak is predicated on finding an exploit. An exploit is simply a bug or other unintended vulnerability that you can take advantage of. Sometimes an exploit is small, and only allows for perhaps a tethered jailbreak or some other minor boost in functionality. If the exploit is large enough that you can gain complete, persistent root access to the lowest levels of the device, though, it becomes possible to create an untethered jailbreak.
Finding a large enough exploit to create an untethered jailbreak is really, really hard. In general, the hackers — such as Comex, Geohot, the iPhone Dev Team, or Evad3rs — need to find a bug or vulnerability in the software (iOS, boot ROM), the hardware (the A4/5/6/7 SoC), or ideally both. Usually these bugs and vulnerabilities are discovered with very low-level tools, such as serial port debugging (pictured above).
Hacking in general, and security research in specific, is a painstaking and intensive task. Suffice it to say that finding exploits is hard, and requires a special kind of mind to even know where to start, let alone to carry it through to completion.
© 2013 extremetech
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