At the end of July, we talked about a new iOS 9 jailbreak for legacy devices called Blizzard by GeoSn0w, and while the main focus of the developer at the time was not on iOS and iPadOS 15, things now seem to be changing.
In the announcements posted on Twitter last week, we see that GeoSn0w believes more people should focus on the iOS and iPadOS 15 scene, and with no visible updates from the checkra1n team or the unc0ver team as of late, and an unknown release date. for the upcoming Cheyote jailbreak by the Odyssey Team, this seems like a sound principle.
Digging deeper into some of the tweets, it appears that GeoSn0w will use the checkm8 bootrom exploit — the same exploit used in the venerable version of the checkra1n jailbreak — in an attempt to perform an experimental non-rooted jailbreak for A7-A11 iOS and Android devices. iPadOS 15.0-15.6.1.
For those who don’t know, A7-A11 devices include iPhones from iPhone 5s to iPhone X, iPads from iPad 2 to iPad 7th generation, and iPod touch 6th and 7th generations.
GeoSn0w is currently planning to have the jailbreak support SSH initially, and eventually add customization support if successful. Some of the wording in one of his tweets shows that he’s not sure if he can achieve this based on his current skill set, as he adds that he might need help setting it up.
GeoSn0w has been actively tweeting progress updates, including a teaser download of patched Ramdisk and Blizzard Core on iOS 15.1 with a detailed download:
Further status updates published via the Ge0Sn0w iDevice Central “Current Status”message show that:
- The checkm8 exploit works on iOS and iPadOS 15 and 16.
- AMFI/Codesign successfully patched at the kernel level
- Created Ramdisk with SSH support
- Root filesystem successfully mounted
Important things still require a lot of work, such as:
- Implementing sandbox patches
- Implementing kernel patches
- Work on bootstrap
- Testing and running tweaks, injections and package managers
- Fixing Other Aspects of the Jailbreak
- And probably much more…
As you would expect from jailbreak development, this is a very complex procedure that requires a lot of time, trial and error, before it can be tested and released to the public. With this in mind, GeoSn0w makes no promises to the community. While he’s trying to do a jailbreak, the fact remains that he doesn’t seem to be confident in his ability to do a jailbreak and is just trying.
Since the GeoSn0w jailbreak attempt will work via the checkm8 exploit, it’s important to note that Odyssey Team’s upcoming Cheyote jailbreak will support much newer devices, but it will only work on iOS and iPadOS versions 15.0-15.1.1. If successful, Blizzard for iOS and iPadOS 15 will only support older devices running A7-A11, but will work with a wider range of firmwares from 15.0 to 15.6.1. Notably, even Siguza from the checkra1n team seems to be working on iOS and iPadOS 15 support, however there is no ETA for that.
At the moment it seems like it can be followed, but just remember that no releases are promised and this is a very experimental attempt to create another iOS and iPadOS 15 jailbreak. While we don’t advise you to hold your breath, we wish GeoSn0w the best of luck on his journey..