We have some great news for jailbreakers. After successfully getting root shell access in iOS 11.3, Chinese security researcher and hacker, Min Zheng aka SparkZheng has revealed that he has successfully jailbroken iOS 11.3.
Zheng has teased iOS 11.3 jailbreaks before, however what makes things different this time around is that he has shown Cydia installed on the device. As you can see in the screenshot above Cydia and MTerminal, which is a jailbreak application are installed on the device.
He has been actively discussing the progress on his Twitter account where last month he announced that they have been able to get root shell on the latest build of iOS 11.3. Then a few days ago he shared another screenshot while noting that what’s seen in it is not a jailbreak since they have not been able to remount the rootfs to R/W and don’t have Cydia running on it. However that has apparently changed as seen in his recent tweet and screenshots he has shared with us.
This time. It's a real JB now…😜😜😜 @bxl1989 pic.twitter.com/OnYZUQb6nl
— Min(Spark) Zheng (@SparkZheng) May 8, 2018
This latest tweet comes with the words “This time. It’s a real JB now” which confirms that the said researcher has been able to overcome some of the previous problems and actually get Cydia installed on the device. The tweet also contained two accompanying screenshots showing Cydia on the iPhone’s Home screen as well as the root shell access showing the existence of Cydia.app in the /Applications folder.
It’s definitely exciting to see that progress has been made from Zheng’s side but it’s a little too early to be getting excited about exactly what this means for the community as a whole. It’s very likely that Min Zheng has been able to jailbreak the device running on iOS 11.3 and get Cydia installed using complex methods which involve a lot of work from the command line. This is not going to be a suitable solution for any device owner who wants to be liberated on iOS 11.3 and will, therefore, need some additional work to package everything together into a tool which can be released to the community.
With that said, there isn’t even confirmation that Zheng is willing to undertake that work and provide something usable to community. If we were to guess it, we would say that it’s highly unlikely that Zheng will share his work with the public in the form of a jailbreak tool.
Apple has already closed the iOS 11.3 signing window, meaning that anyone upgrading to iOS 11.3.1 or beyond will have an incredibly difficult – if not impossible – time downgrading back to a vulnerable version of iOS. Stick to iOS 11.2.x or iOS 11.3.0 if you want to have any chance of jailbreaking your device in future. You’ve been warned.