At DEF CON 25, one of the world’s largest annual hacking conferences, Max Bazaliy showed off an Apple Watch jailbreak. This is the first successful public display of a WatchOS 3 jailbreak. For the most tech savvy among us, Bazaliy even went into full detail about how the jailbreak was achieved. At the bottom of this page you can find his slideshow with details about the Apple Watch jailbreak.
Much like jailbreaking the iPhone, there are numerous features opened up by an Apple Watch jailbreak. Bazaliy’s jailbreak offers access to the full file system as well as databases for calls, messaging, health, and more.
Right now, the jailbreak is only a private jailbreak. There’s no indication as to whether the jailbreak will be made public in the future or not, but it’s probably unlikely there will be a public jailbreaking tool released soon. There’s also a very good chance that Apple will move quickly to close up any security holes that allowed the Apple Watch jailbreak in the first place. And, as we discussed in our iOS jailbreaking piece, there is also a huge financial benefit to selling jailbreaks to private companies. Hackers that manage to break through Apple’s defenses stand to make a lot of money from security firms or even Apple themselves.
Whether this Apple Watch jailbreak goes public or not, it’s exciting to see that there are still people working hard at jailbreaking devices with the hopes of improving the experience for users. It’s arguable that the iPhone would not be what it is today without the dedicated people working on jailbreaking back in the days of the iPhone 3GS. Perhaps Apple Watch can enjoy the same kind of advancements thanks to hackers like Max Bazaliy. Since Bazaliy was so revealing in how he arrived at his jailbreak method, there could be several hackers that use his method and improve upon it in time for another presentation at next year’s DEF CON conference. The Apple Watch jailbreak era may just be kicking off.
