Two iOS 6 updates after the Evad3rs team released their jailbreak, Apple is finally testing a beta that seals the holes in its defense, closing at least one of five exploits the team of four hackers took advantage of in their jailbreak software.
Apple released its iOS 6.1.3 beta 2 update last week and David Wang, a member of the Evad3rs, told Andy Greenberg at Forbes that he is still inspecting the patch to seek out another exploitable bug. “If one of the vulnerabilities doesn’t work, evasi0n doesn’t work,” Wang said.
Apple rarely allows jailbreaks to go unpatched for so long — nearly a month — but several bugs in the iOS 6 update had to be addressed before the company could move on to restricting user freedoms again. Previously, a problem with 4G access was patched with iOS 6.1.1, while the battery-draining excessive logging issue with Microsoft Exchange was fixed in 6.1.2.
Another reason Apple may have been slow to act on the Evasi0n jailbreak, Greenberg hypothesizes, is because it requires users to plug their iDevice into their computer a run a program, posing a relatively small security risk compared to JailbreakMe, which only required people to visit a site before the phone would be instantly jailbroken.
Industry experts also say that malicious hackers could use the Evasi0n tool to break into other users' phones, then use the jailbreak to hide their tracks, meaning the Evad3rs' well-intentioned tool could be exploited by less benign forces.
The Evasi0n jailbreak became the most popular phone hacking tool in history, with over 7 million users installing it just four days after its release. Its popularity may have had something to do with the amount of time it took to release — at over 140 days, Evasi0n was the slowest jailbreak to become available, mostly due to the experience Apple gained in fixing earlier exploits in previous versions of its iDevices.
Fear not, people who wish to update; Wang says his team has discovered nearly enough vulnerabilities to build another jailbreak tool once the current one is fixed for good, but if Apple finds and fixes all or most of them, they would have to start over from scratch. In the meantime, sticking with iOS 6.1.1 and iOS 6.1.2 after 6.1.3 rolls out of beta could be the best course of action.
