Jailbreak Nation: Hackers Pop iPhone 18 Pro on Live Stage, and $BTC Miners Take Notes 🍏

Security researchers at Calif.io pulled off the first untethered jailbreak of an iPhone 18 Pro running iOS 27.0.1, demonstrating the exploit live on stage at Hexacon in Paris on Friday. The demonstration, which took place on the conference's opening day, October 16, marks the first time a permanent jailbreak that survives a reboot has been achieved on Apple's current flagship hardware without a computer attached.

Video posted by jailbreak researcher Billy Ellis (@bellis1000) on X shows the Calif team rebooting the device, unlocking it with the standard passcode, and opening an SSH session as root, the highest level of system access. Terminal output captured during the demo lists the device as running iOS 27.0.1 with an uptime of roughly two minutes. Apple designs iOS as a locked-down environment using signed code, per-app sandboxes, and a protected startup chain, so a working untethered jailbreak means those defenses have been defeated end to end. With root access, a user can install apps outside the App Store, browse the full file system, delete preinstalled software, and otherwise modify the operating system in ways Apple does not authorize.

Reaching root on a current iPhone typically requires chaining vulnerabilities that escape the app sandbox, compromise the kernel, and bypass hardware-backed mitigations such as Pointer Authentication Codes, which detect tampering with memory pointers. Calif has not disclosed which specific bugs were used, and no public jailbreak tool has been released. The firm's newsletter from the conference lists four demos, including a one-click Signal exploit and an iMessage attack, and states everything "will be released in due time."

The Hexacon demonstration builds on prior public work by Calif researchers. In April, Thai Duong wrote that Anthropic's Claude helped him dissect an iOS Safari exploit in a technical series on how a real iPhone jailbreak is constructed. In May, Calif said Claude helped the team build a macOS kernel exploit against Apple's M5 chip protections in under a week. Hexacon runs October 16 and 17 in Paris and is aimed at offensive security researchers presenting vulnerabilities in widely used platforms.