A new unpatchable flaw in Apple chips opens the door to an iPhone jailbreak

A company that sells spyware and hacking tools to government agencies has published details of a vulnerability in Apple chips that can potentially help hackers unlock older iPhones.

The short version

• This could help security researchers develop a so-called iPhone jailbreak, a technique to hack into Apple’s mobile operating system and remove all the restrictions the company puts on it.
• The release is also a reminder that while Apple has made iPhones extremely hard to hack, there are and will always be vulnerabilities that sophisticated hackers can take advantage of to break in.
• The flaw and related exploit affect iPhones that have Apple-made chips A12 and A13, which were released in 2018 and 2019, and are included in older iPhones such as the XS, XR and up to the iPhone 11.
• The release of usbliter8 is significant in the world of security research and spyware and hacking tools’ makers, but it does not mean that older iPhones are easily hackable by anyone.

What happened

The bug found by Paradigm Shift affects the iPhone’s Boot ROM , which is the first piece of code that runs when an iPhone is turned on and, consequently, its first line of defense against hackers. To hack an iPhone with physical access to it — meaning having the ability to connect a cable to it — hackers need to first exploit the Boot ROM.

Why it matters

Now, they can do that thanks to usbliter8, which allows them to potentially defeat and bypass further security checks.

Summary by Nerd News Network. Read the full article at TechCrunch via the links above and below.