Given the fact that the jailbreak community appears to have the momentum of a freight train at the moment, this news was always on the horizon. However, it’s now been confirmed that iOS 12 beta 1 has been successfully jailbroken thanks to the wonderfully talented Liang Chen of the Tencent Keen Lab.

It’s worth putting it out there from the offset that we do not expect that this work will ever see the light of day, meaning that Chen will likely never release this jailbreak into the community.

The jailbreak itself has been achieved on the very first beta of Apple’s iOS 12 platform, which currently has at least three months left to run in a pre-release state before it goes to the public. With that in mind, no-one with the intention of releasing a jailbreak would burn their methods on an early pre-release seed. 

It’s also highly likely that this work has been undertaken to show capability and that it’s actually possible to liberate iOS 12.

To showcase the jailbreak, Liang Chen took to Twitter to confirm that he had been successful in liberating Apple’s iOS 12 platform. Rather than provide any additional information in the tweet, Chen simply linked interested parties to a video of the jailbreak in progress, running on Apple’s iPhone X hardware and hosted on video-sharing website YouTube.

As you would expect, then the tweet is peppered with replies by the often abrasive community claiming that it’s a “fake” and that it can’t possibly be real as it requires a Cydia update from Jay Freeman.

Anyone who understands the pedigree of Liang Chen, Marco Grassi, and the Tencent Keen Lab team, on the whole, will immediately understand that this jailbreak is indeed real. However, “real” doesn’t mean that it will be released into the public domain, as this jailbreak will never see the light of day. It’s likely that the team will be analyzing iOS 12, collecting vulnerabilities, and then potentially profiting from those discoveries by reporting them to Apple.

The team will also likely use the discovery work to prepare presentations and talks to present at security conferences around the world.

So, iOS 12 can be jailbroken, but this particular one will not be released to public.

Source: redmond pie