$1 million Jailbreak for iOS 9.1: Here is why Pangu team did not contest - iPhoneHeat

$1 million Jailbreak for iOS 9.1: Here is why Pangu team did not contest

A couple of days ago, we reported about a hacking team who developed a browser-based iOS 9.1 jailbreak and won the $1 million bounty from Zerodium. Since Zerodium is known as a platform acquiring vulnerabilities and exploits, they won’t release the iOS 9.1 jailbreak to the general public.

jailbreak million bounty

Instead of releasing this browser-based jailbreak tot he general public, Zerodium plans on providing this latest iOS 9.1 jailbreak to “customers, whom the company has described as major corporations in defense, technology, and finance seeking zero-day attack protection as well as government organizations in need of specific and tailored cybersecurity capabilities.”

Daniel K, a key member of the well-known team Pangu, has turned Weibo to clarify their stand about the bounty program. He said that the team Pangu will never consider taking on the challenge to win $1 million bounty. To better explain their decision to stay away from such bounty programs, Daniel shared a slide which they presented at the Ruxcon Security Conference in Melbourne held in late October. The slide explains why they would not take any such challenge. Here is the slide:

pangu bounty

The core objective behind releasing Pangu jailbreak is to provide the end user with full control over their devices and to conduct security research. The slide also states that the browser-based jailbreak are very dangerous for security and the exploits used can easily be abused, which kills the objective of releasing the jailbreak tool. The also pointed out that since a browser-based jailbreak is too dangerous for the platform security, Apple will be quick to fix such exploits, shortening the life span of the jailbreak tool.

The last browser-based (userland) jailbreak was released by Comex back in 2011. It was called jailbreaMe, which exploited the vulnerabilities of the mobile Safari to obtain the root access of iOS.

It is a great news for the whole jailbreak community that the teams like Pangu are still working on providing quality jailbreak tools to iOS users without compromising the security of the operating system installed on their devices. We hope that the team will come up with an iOS 9.1 jailbreak real soon.

[reddit]

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