Many users jailbreak iPhones to add applications and modifications that are not authorized by Apple. They also often jailbreak their devices and install third-party applications. Many of us know jailbreaking makes our iPhones less secure. But what exactly are the security concerns? And how does jailbreaking make Apple devices vulnerable? Let’s understand this.

What is a Jail?

Berkeley Software Distribution, or BSD, is a Unix Operating System derivative that was developed by the Computer Systems Research Group of the University of California, Berkeley, from 1977 to 1995. It shared the initial codebase of the AT&T Unix Operating System. Later, BSD releases were incorporated into several open-source development projects like FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, etc. It was later incorporated into some modern proprietary Operating Systems, including Apple OS X and iOS.

In FreeBSD, the jail mechanism implements Operating System-level Virtualization. In this mechanism, the Operating System kernel allows the existence of multiple user-space instances instead of just one. These instances are called jails.

Jails usually solve the following purposes :

• Each jail provides a virtual environment on the device with its own files, processes, users, and superuser account.
• Each jail runs separately from the other and they cannot influence each other while running, which gives an additional layer of security.
• Each jail has a limited scope of execution, which enables several tasks to run with superuser access without having complete control over the system. This enhances the device’s security to a great extent. Even if a particular jail gets hacked and the hacker gets root access, he will have limited access to the system files and can do no significant harm to the main system.

And, the same mechanism is used in Apple iOS devices also, as FreeBSD was incorporated in iOS.

What is Jailbreaking an iPhone?

Jailbreaking in iOS is the process of gaining unauthorized access or elevated privileges on a system. It basically modifies the iOS kernel and allows the file system read and write access to an application.

Most of the jailbreaking tools apply some kernel patches to the iOS kernel and make some unauthorized …