14 DAY TRIAL // Nineteen-year-old iOS hacker Nicholas Allegra, better known online as comex, has taken up an internship position at Apple, the company whose devices he has helped jailbreak for the past several years.
Comex impressed the infosecurity community with his JailbreakMe 2.0 and 3.0 exploits that had a high level of sophistication and required impressive skills to create.
JailbreakMe is a series of one-step jailbreaks for iOS devices that only require users to visit a website and swipe for confirmation.
Developing such drive-by exploits for iOS is far from easy and comex has managed to do it twice which earned him the respect of fellow iOS hackers and security researchers.
"Starting to get a handle on jailbreakme.com exploit. Very beautiful work. Scary how it totally defeats apple's security architecture," commented renowned Apple hacker Charlie Miller shortly after JailbreakMe 2.0 was released last year.
Then in July comex did it again with JailbreakMe 3.0, the exploit he created earning him the 2011 Pwnie Award for Best Client-Side Bug.
"This exploit is a great example of programming a weird machine to exploit a modern system. Comex used his control over the interpreter to construct a highly sophisticated ROP payload at runtime and bypass the ASLR protection in iOS.
"Furthermore, the ROP payload exploited a kernel vulnerability to execute code in the kernel and disable code-signing," said the judging panel which is made up of world-renowned security researchers like Alexander Sotirov, Dino Dai Zovi, HD Moore, Mark Dowd, Halvar Flake, Dave Goldsmith, Dave Aitel and others.
When security industry superstars recognize your work as being the best, then it's clear that you're a talented individual. That's what led Forbes to profile the hacker at the beginning of this month.
The publication ended its article with a message to Apple that read "Perhaps your security team could use another intern." A couple of weeks later comex was announcing on his Twitter feed that "the week after next I will be starting an internship with Apple."