Jailbreak an iPhone with checkra1n

A rooted Android phone opens plenty of opportunities for the enthusiast community by opening the door for all kinds of crazy stuff, such as jailbreaking the iPhone.

Jailbreaking an iPhone is the same as the rooting an Android device in its core concept. Users are essentially granting themself by expanding the permissions and disabling many of protections that are built in the OS, iOS, and Android, respectively. While rooting many popular Android phones, it becomes a meaningless matter but, the cooperative of OEMs jailbreak of an iPhone still a moving challenge as Apple and its walled-garden approach. Every time whenever a jailbreak releases, the Apple company works on patching the blaming the who allowed it to happen, they close the door for the same solutions which are usable for the future devices and future software updates. Jailbreaks turn to be very specific on the devices and iOS version the company work on, and it also requires specific and particular steps to achieve success.

Checkra1n is one jailbreak solution, which is the first jailbreak for Apple devices running iOS 13, and it also works on a wide variety of Apple hardware. As it utilizes an effort that targets a mistake in the Boot ROM on Apple hardware instead of a vulnerability within iOS, and it also comes as one of the only solutions which work around the software updates on accessible devices. The Checkra1n disadvantage is a semi-tethered jailbreak; it means that the user needs to re-jailbreak every time they reboot their device. The jailbreak was initially possible by MacOS v10.10+.

Recently, Checkra1n got the support for Linux, which is making it possible to jailbreak the iOS 13 devices by using a Linux computer. So, it expands the possible platforms the users they can use. But, a Reddit user /u/stblr finds out that this can also tackle the inconvenience aspect of a semi-tethered jailbreak by letting the users jailbreak by using a rooted Android smartphone.

Reddit user /u/stblr find out some conditions:

1. The user needs an iPhone or iPad, which is compatible with Checkra1n (iPhone 5s to iPhone X, iOS 12.3, and up).
2. There should be an Android device with root access, preferably with the new Linux and Android versions. The video demo used a Sony Xperia XZ1 Compact on Android 10 with the Linux kernel 4.14, and it was rooted with Magisk.
3. There should be a terminal app on the user Android phone.
4. The way to connect the two phones, some of Apple’s USB-C to the Lightning cables don’t work as they lack in pins to put the iDevice into DFU mode.

The steps for jailbreaking are simple, as compare to the more complicated methods the iOS community had seen in the past:

• User has to download the Checkra1n binary for Linux, by noting the correct µarch of their Android device:

1. Users can check their phone’s architecture by running the ADB command in their computer while their phone is connected:

adb shell getprop ro.product.cpu.abi

The output will be the user’s phone architecture.

• User has to place the downloaded binary into /data on their rooted Android phone. Users can search their device in their subforums to know the best method to root it.
• Users have to connect their iDevice to their Android phones.
• Then users have to open the terminal app and gain the root access by typing the su command.
• User has to type lsusb to check that if their iDevice is recognized. The USB ID displayed should be 05ac:12a8.
• Users have to put their iDevice into DFU (Device Firmware Upgrade) mode. They can find the device-specific instructions here.
• Users have to check whether their iDevice is recognized with lsusb or not. Now, the USB ID displayed should be 05ac:1227.
• Now, the user has to run checkra1n in CLI mode by using the command ./checkra1n -c.
• Now the users iDevice should be jailbroken. However, the method is not safe, so the user might have to retry the steps to achieve success.

The steps might appear to be daunting, but they are not. If the user has a rooted device, then the user is comfortable with the following instructions and typing in a few commands. The jailbreaking and rooting devices come with risks. So, the user should not attempt either without fully understanding what they are doing.