When Apple released iOS & iPadOS 16.7 back in 2023, they patched a security vulnerability discovered by Bill Marczak that has since been coined CVE-2023-41992. Apple noted in the online ‘About the security content of iOS 16.7 and iPadOS 16.7’ support document page that this was a kernel vulnerability that may have enabled an attacker to elevate their privileges.
Just this week, iOS security researcher @karzan_0x455 took to social media platform 𝕏 (formerly Twitter) to share what appears to be a proof of concept for this local privilege escalation-related vulnerability along with a full kernel crash log, showcasing how it can be used.
Those wanting to check it out can head over to the security researcher’s GitHub page, which shows everything you need to know about the CVE-2023-41992 local privilege escalation bug.
While a proof of concept isn’t an exploit, it can show hackers what they need to know to go about making one. Public exploits can then go on to be used for a variety of different things, including making jailbreaks (when combined with other security mitigation bypasses), providing new TrollStore installation methods, and updating semi-jailbreaks such as Serotonin.
It’s very unlikely that this bug will go on to make anything meaningful for jailbreaking, especially since we’d need additional things like a PAC and PPL bypass to go along with any resulting exploits to make any jailbreaks.
On the other hand, it’s possible that the vulnerability could prove useful in making another TrollStore installation method, potentially up to and including iOS & iPadOS firmware 17.0, as explained by frequent jailbreak commentator @MasterMike88.
Given these facts, along with the knowledge that iOS & iPadOS 19 are just a few months away, it seems unlikely that developers will pay much mind to this vulnerability. On the other hand, those users still holding out on affected, yet unjailbreakable firmware, could have something to look forward to if anyone in the community happens to pick this up.
If anything should come out of this proof of concept, be that an exploit, or some new project, we’ll be sure to keep our readers apprised.
