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0 points0x012y ago0 comments

A lot of the recent jailbreaks seem to depend on symlink shenanigans. I wonder why Apple can't simply remove symlink support from iOS' filesystem driver? Is there anything in iOS or the appstore apps that depend on it?

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innoying12y ago· 2 in thread

Many parts of the internal system depend on it. Here's a run of `find / -type l` on a jailbroken iPhone 5: https://gist.github.com/innoying/8cd04821e17b3f67aa4b

A few of those are created by the jailbreak but most are core parts of the system.

gluxon12y ago

That's actually a lot less than I thought would be in the iOS filesystem.

It doesn't seem like it'd be incredibly hard to remove those symlinks. Although Apple would probably favor fixing the bugs that allow malicious symlinks rather than remove symlinks from their file system driver (the horror!)

innoying12y ago

They would also have to make sure no iOS applications make use of symlinks at any point. Since a ipa is simply a zip archive it's possible (and probable) that some applications already make use of symlinks on install or during operation. I think that's the major motivation.

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