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Showing posts from May, 2015

Jailbreaking iOS is a Dead Man Walking

Rumor has it that Apple will include a new security feature (possibly known to the developers in Apple as "Rootless") in the upcoming releases iOS 9 and OS X 10.11. Although details are sparse, it looks like Apple may have implemented what other UNIX systems call "namespaces" (See this nice discussion of namespaces on Linux ). Most of the public speculation about the rumor concerns a possible end to jailbreaking , a sport which has fallen on hard times with successful jailbreaks coming fewer and farther between. Since the defects which enable jailbreaking are inherently open to malware, Apple's ongoing efforts to find and fix these bugs with the LLVM/Clang compiler's ever-more-diligent static analyzer make it harder for the jailbreak community to find a toehold. However, a namespaces-like security architecture might fix one of the biggest issues that leads people to desire a jailbroken iPhone. When iOS was created, the system extension features were