If you’re a fan of hacking in general, a motto to live by is “Good things come to those who wait AND listen” and this especially true in the iOS jailbreaking scene. Those who waited on iOS 11.3.1 and for Ian Beer to release his work can now start hacking their devices!

Ian Beer releases his VFS exploit and Houdini and noncesetter1131UI updated

If you’re an A7 user on iOS 11 that has blobs for iOS 10.2-10.3.3, you can now go back to sanity by setting your nonce and jumping back to iOS 10!

Last week, Ian Beer released the first of his promised exploits which called the ‘multi_path’ exploit. While this exploit gave a head-start to jailbreaking development on iOS 11.3.1, it had a major downside which was the fact that it needed the end-user to have a $99/year Apple Developer account for it to work.

However, Ian Beer has now released his other exploit, callled the VFS or empty_list exploit! This exploit doesn’t require a developer account so it can be used by everybody. Currently, this exploit is used in the following publicly available software:

• noncreboot1131UI which is a n0ncesetter by pwn20wnd
  • This allows people who have blobs for iOS 10.2-10.3.3 to downgrade their A7 (this only works on A7 devices excluding the iPad Mini 3 and late iPad Mini 2 models) device to those versions.
    

    You can now have root access while having a picture of a pony on your iDevice!

    Others can set their n0nce so that they could restore back to iOS 11.3 or 11.3.1 if they manage to bootloop their device provided they have blobs!

• Houdini beta3 release 1 by Abraham Masri
  • Houdini lets you do some visual modification to your device such as changing how the pass-code screen looks, customising the control centre, partially theming your device and modifying the screen resolution.
• Rebirth by Hacker Fantastic
  • A tool that allows you to access a root shell on port 31337 and opens a web port on port 80

Other than that, there are some other things that will most likely be released in a short while which include FilzaEscaped (by AppleDry05) and Osiris jailbreak (a limited jailbreak that allows remounting / as R/W  and disabling iOS updates) by GeoSnow.

Progress relating to Electra

Of course, the star of the show for iOS 11.3.1 will be the upcoming Electra update that’ll support it. Electra is a KPP-less jailbreak which currently supports iOS 11.0-11.1.2 and allows you to do all your jailbreak things such as installing tweaks, applying themes, installing IPAs without Cydia Impactor and much more!

Coolstar is making progress in getting themes and tweaks up and running but for now, you can only feast your eyes on this screenshot of his iPad 😉

The iOS 11.3.1 update has currently seen this progress:

• Coolstar is working on it and has been able to get root access (like many others), OpenSSH running and code injection working.
• Pwn20wnd is also hard at work fixing bugs in the upcoming Electra update and is currently adding proper bootstrap support.

• Umang Raghuvanshi (umanghere) has released a write-up on persistently remounting / (rootfs) as R/W which is an important thing in jailbreaking and could potentially be used in Electra.

• Other developers such as nullpixel are also working on making the update possible!

Conclusion

Without a doubt, it won’t be extremely long before iOS 11.3.1 gets jailbroken but as always, don’t be an ‘eta kid‘! For more information, follow the people mentioned above on Twitter and don’t forget to constantly refresh /r/jailbreak 😉

Jailbreak subreddit (great information source + karma farm for lucky ones): https://www.reddit.com/r/jailbreak/

noncereboot1131UI for the non-dev bug: https://twitter.com/Pwn20wnd/status/1007206902512545792

Houdini website: https://iabem97.github.io/houdini_website/

Rebirth tool: https://twitter.com/hackerfantastic/status/1007376357116895232