It’s been an interesting couple of days in the jailbreak world. Not only did the evad3rs surprise everyone with an iOS 7 jailbreak early Sunday morning, but there was all this drama surrounding the release which included a new app store and the resurfacing of Geohot.
After a long break, Geohot’s name popped back up this weekend with reports that he was working on his own jailbreak. He obviously didn’t get a chance to release it, but he did manage to reverse the evad3r’s evasi0n7 app and he says he didn’t find anything sketchy…
Here’s an excerpt from his lengthy writeup, which he linked to on his Twitter account late last night:
“This writeup takes place from the perspective of evasi0n7. F*ck secrets. Note that this writeup doesn’t help Apple, I got this by reversing the public evasi0n binary, which they can, and do do. Also note, I found nothing sketchy in my reversing, your phones most likely aren’t being backdoored by Chinese. If I ever touch jailbreaking again, which is unlikely(until ARM128 comes out, I only touched the game again for the love of ARM64), no more secrets. Full disclosure time, I was working on a public, free of charge, china not involved, old school jailbreak with a few others. evad3rs released first. That jailbreak overlapped this one 80%, partly due to leaks, but mainly due to the exploits and methodology being the obvious choice(great minds, well you know), meaning the exploits won’t be usable next time. No more jailbreaks ever?”
So a few things of note here. First, the fact that Geohot says he didn’t find anything sketchy bodes well for the folks who were spooked by rumors that the Chinese app store TaiG included in evasi0n7 featured hidden code that sent private user information back to China.
And second, that Geohot says he was working on a free-of-charge jailbreak conflicts with reports that he was working on a deal to sell his work to a company for $350,000. He says it was never going to happen, but you can hear a leaked recording of the negotiations here.
Nevertheless, this writeup is impressive—even more so that he says he did it while on a plane from San Francisco to New York—and will hopefully put any remaining fears to bed. If you’re into this sort of thing, you can read the entire thing here on Geohot’s website.
