What possibly will speed up the creation of an untethered, fully working iOS 9 jailbreak? Will a $3 million bounty accelerate the iOS 9 jailbreak release date?
Security firm Zerodium of France is convinced that with a proper motivation, developers can crack iOS 9 and come up with a "workable, remote and untethered jailbreak that will persist even after reboot." Interested parties - the likes of Team Evad3rs, the Pangu Team from China and TaiG - have until October 31 to submit their works and collect a cash haul of between a million to three million dollars.
Zerodium expects that the rich bounty will attract "experienced security researchers, reverse engineers and jailbreak developers," BGR said in a report. The $3-million is dangled as the firm acknowledges that starting off with iOS 8, Apple's OS security has become tougher than ever.
The iPhone and iPad operating system, Zerodium said, "has the highest cost and complexity of vulnerability exploitation," hence the amount being offered to would-be successful jailbreakers.
The offer is legitimate, BGR affirmed on its report, noting too that Zerodium is connected to Vupen Security that counts the U.S. National Security Agency as a client.
Now the questions beg: Who will take the bite? And how soon will a jailbreak come out considering the offer from Zerodium?
Veteran iOS hacker iH8Sn0w has earlier showed off a working iOS 9 jailbreak on an iPhone 5. But the dev clarified that what he has is a work in progress and already declared that he no intentions of releasing a public build of the jailbreak.
Will the $3 million bounty, however, change his mind? At the moment, he is on the top list of possible takers on the account of his existing iOS 9 jailbreak regardless of its rough status.
Next in line are the three groups known for their previous jailbreak releases. Team Evad3rs was last heard off with the iOS 7 jailbreak. Then the Chinese group Pangu Team picked up from where the Evad3rs left off and continued with the iOS 8 jailbreak version. TaiG also contributed to the effort.
Will of any of these three take the challenge and produce a jailbreak that will adhere to the rules laid down by Zerodium? Or better yet, will they decide to collaborate and beat the end of October 2015 deadline set by the security group?
It should be noted, however, that like in past cases an iOS 9 jailbreak release date is not expected until the arrival of a major update. In the new iOS version's case, iOS 9.1 release is seen as the precursor for developers to finalize their jailbreaking activities.