In fairness, many of the bugs which enable jailbreaking also represent serious security problems. For instance, the various iterations of web-based exploits fundamentally do represent remote code execution, a serious bug in any browser environment. On any other platform, we'd classify them exclusively as security vulnerabilities; however, on iOS, the user has to take advantage of security vulnerabilities to break into their own system.
Not necessarily. Remote exploits, definitely, but entirely local jailbreaks that require booting the phone into a specialized firmware-loading mode don't actually impact the user's security, just Apple's anti-tampering guards against the user.
Wrong. The first jailbreak was done because the iPhone trusted the restore mode commands coming from iTunes. The protocol was totally reworked so that the iPhone would only run some canned scripts. This did nothing to improve device security (it pretty much only enabled the jailbreak), but Apple fixed it fast.
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"Unless they're downright critical or enable jailbreaking", you mean.
In fairness, many of the bugs which enable jailbreaking also represent serious security problems. For instance, the various iterations of web-based exploits fundamentally do represent remote code execution, a serious bug in any browser environment. On any other platform, we'd classify them exclusively as security vulnerabilities; however, on iOS, the user has to take advantage of security vulnerabilities to break into their own system.
s/many/all/
Not necessarily. Remote exploits, definitely, but entirely local jailbreaks that require booting the phone into a specialized firmware-loading mode don't actually impact the user's security, just Apple's anti-tampering guards against the user.
Wrong. The first jailbreak was done because the iPhone trusted the restore mode commands coming from iTunes. The protocol was totally reworked so that the iPhone would only run some canned scripts. This did nothing to improve device security (it pretty much only enabled the jailbreak), but Apple fixed it fast.