GreenPois0n Absinthe was built upon pod2g’s Corona untether jailbreak to create the first public jailbreak for the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 on for the 5.0.1 firmware. In this paper, the team presents a chain of multiple exploits to accomplish sandbox breakout, kernel unsigned code injection and execution that result in a fully-featured and untethered jailbreak.
Corona is an acronym for “racoon”, which is the primary victim for this attack. A format string vulnerability was located in racoon’s error handling routines, allowing the researchers to write arbitrary data to racoon’s stack, one byte at a time, if they can control racoon’s configuration file. Using this technique researchers were able to build a ROP payload on racoon’s stack to mount a rogue HFS volume that injects code at the kernel level and patch its code-signing routines.
The original Corona untether exploit made use of the LimeRa1n bootrom exploit as an injection vector, to allow developers to disable ASLR and sandboxing, and call racoon with a custom configuration script. This however left it unusable for newer A5 devices like the iPad2 and iPhone 4S, which weren’t exploitable to LimeRa1n, so another injection vector was needed.
You can find the material for this presentation here…
