Take a look at some of the techniques they use to accomplish their task

May 24, 2012 23:21 GMT  ·  By

We’re down here in Amsterdam for the 2012 edition of the Hack in the Box and we’ve had the honor of interviewing a few of the members of the Apple jailbreak Dream Team. More precisely, we’ve had a talk with Joshua Hill, also known by his Twitter handle as @p0sixninja, Cyril, aka @pod2g, and Nikias Bassen, or @pimskeks.

We’ll soon have the complete interview published, but in the meantime we’ve learned some things that just couldn’t wait, so we’ll make a few posts in which we detail what the gurus of the jailbreaking had to say.

One of the more interesting things we’ve learned is that they already have the plans laid out for cracking the upcoming iOS 6.

“We won't give up on jailbreaking iOS devices because this is too important for us and we already have a part of the jailbreak for iOS 6 and we will be ready right on time for it,” Cyril said.

So how does the development process of an iOS jailbreak look like?

“We will not give you the exact recipe, but we have other exploits that we won't release at any time. This is our secret. It allows us to inject stuff into new devices and to start dumping the memory. When we have the dumps, we look at different ways of finding the vulnerability,” he explained.

According to the hackers, some of the main ingredients are reverse engineering of the kernel spiced with some fuzzing.

“Each member of the team works differently and this usually leads to finding vulnerabilities quickly. We find them in one month or two and then we start exploiting them. We start this process only when the final version of the system is released,” Cyril added.

“That’s why we always have a delay after the release to do a jailbreak. Because we need to be assured that what we do will work for sure, that they don't fix it in the beta 3 or beta 4, so we start only when the release is here.”

Update. We want to clarify that the hackers didn't actually start working on the iOS 6 jailbreak. When they say that they already have part of it, they refer to the fact that they have certain exploits which they believe they'll be able to use to crack the upcoming versions.

For more details check out the press conference the Dream Team held at Hack in the Box 2012 Amsterdam.