

Jailbreaks make it easier to remove Apple's restrictive protections, analyze how iOS behaves, and probe potential weaknesses and flaws.

Though attackers can use jailbreaking to compromise devices, since it often opens the door to installing more types of malware, the research community generally embraces the practice. "It only enables reading new jailbreak files and parts of the file system that contain no user data."

"This jailbreak basically just adds exceptions to the existing rules," Unc0ver's lead developer, who goes by Pwn20wnd, told WIRED. And the group claims that it preserves Apple's user data protections and doesn't undermine iOS' sandbox security, which keeps programs running separately so they can't access data they shouldn't. Unc0ver says that its jailbreak, which you can install using the longtime jailbreaking platforms AltStore and Cydia (but maybe don't unless you're absolutely sure you know what you're doing), is stable and doesn't drain battery life or prevent use of Apple services like iCloud, Apple Pay, or iMessage. It's been years since a jailbreak has been available for a current version of iOS for more than a few days-making this yet another knock on Apple's faltering security image. But on Saturday, a hacker group called Unc0ver released a tool that will "jailbreak" all versions of iOS from 11 to 13.5. Over the years, Apple has made it prohibitively difficult to install unapproved software on its locked-down devices.
