Evad3rs Hacker Planetbeing is Doing a Reddit AMA

Planetbeing, a member of the Evad3rs and key hacker behind the iOS 6.1 jailbreak, is currently doing a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything).

I'm happy to answer any questions anyone has for me, though the rest of the evad3rs seem to be asleep right now.

HIGHLIGHTS:


Q: Do you think Apple will ever just release an open iOS?

A: It's hard to say. Apple has successfully mitigated many vectors of attack in iOS 6. In this current jailbreak, we "evaded" Apple's mitigations in the userland with several vulnerabilities I would perhaps characterize as "lame", since these mistakes are a throwback to earlier days of iOS jailbreaking where we primarily used filesystem tricks. We only attacked Apple's hardened security head-on in the kernel. "Lame" vulnerabilities tend to be hard to find, however, so it's likely the next jailbreak will be tougher. That said, we also retain a few tricks that may or may not help in the future. Who knows what the weight of each factor should be when trying to determine how long the next jailbreak will take.

I think the ship has sailed for Apple to consider shipping an open iOS. The furthest they might have gone was perhaps allowing you to unlock the bootloader like the Google Nexus phones. However, I don't think they currently have a compelling reason to.


Q: What is your opinion on what future iOS versions will bring? Mainly thinking of widgets supported natively (similar to Android).


A: When I first saw the SBWeeApp interface and Notification Center, I thought for sure they'd have some way to let AppStore apps add to it. However, the primary issue is that all the widgets currently reside in a single process, which means they're very likely to be able to interfere with each other. In something like the AppStore ecosystem, the probability approaches 1 and there could be a lot of problems. Compounded with this is the fact that that process is SpringBoard, which is the entire shell for iOS, so any problems are rather catastrophic (tweaks crashing SpringBoard is never fun!). However, they are apparently working on compartmentalizing SpringBoard (it used to be the window manager for the OS as well) and perhaps there's a way to host different views that are actually controlled by separate processes, so it might be possible in the future. Another possibility is some widgets that are primarily determined by property lists or something, similar to how the Settings app works.

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