In case you haven’t been paying attention to the jailbreak scene, security researcher @alfiecg_dev recently used a custom kernel exploit called Vertex to tease the Apex jailbreak for select iOS 14 devices.
The vulnerability exploited by Vertex is the same as the one used by the PhysPuppet physical-use-after-free (PUAF) method in the Kernel File Descriptor (KFD) exploit.
But in the latest commit to Vertex, announced in a post shared to social media platform 𝕏 (formerly Twitter) over the weekend, we learn that the landa PUAF method has been integrated, which adds support for the remaining iOS 15 versions. In short, Vertex now support all devices running iOS 14 and 15.
While these iOS & iPadOS versions aren’t as widely used as newer versions today, many jailbreakers tend to stay on the lowest possible firmware and avoid software updates to be able to take advantage of these kinds of developments.
With the availability of this exploit on @alfiecg_dev’s GitHub page, developers can learn more about it there. It remains to be seen if older jailbreaks might receive updates to incorporate the newer exploit. Moreover, we expect that the Apex jailbreak could incorporate support for the latest Vertex updates, therefore picking up support for more firmware versions.
Apex isn’t the first exploit that @alfiecg_dev has been involved in; before it, he was responsible for the Trigon deterministic exploit, which is so good that it touts a 0% failure rate once triggered. It’s also true that @alfiecg_dev played an instrumental role in the development of TrollStore, as well as TrollInstallerX.
Indeed – the young security researcher has made quite the name for themselves, and it seems like their efforts only continue to get more interesting with each passing day. What comes next? We’ll just have to wait and see…
