Over the years, Apple has made it prohibitively difficult to jailbreak iOS, which lets you install whatever software you want want on the normally locked-down devices.

But on Saturday, the jailbreaking team Unc0ver released a tool that will jailbreak all versions of iOS from 11 to the 13.5.

"It’s very in line with the early jailbreak spirit.".

Then in September, a researcher published details of an unpatchable Apple hardware flaw that could be exploited to jailbreak virtually every type of Apple mobile device released between 2011 and 2017, including iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches, Apple TVs.

Today's Unc0ver jailbreak is the first built on a so-called zero day vulnerability in years.

This means that Unc0ver did not disclose its findings to Apple in advance, and that there's no patch coming in the next few days that will block the jailbreak.

Both Pwn20wnd and independent iOS security researchers estimate that it will take Apple two to three weeks minimum to prepare a fix unless they have already found the bug independently and are in the process of patching it.

"It’s very in line with the early jailbreak spirit.".

Apple and iOS-focused security researchers have been locked in an increasingly heated battle over the tradeoffs of Apple's stringent security protections.

Apple sued the security company Corellium last year for making an iOS emulator that researchers can use to analyze the operating system.

And if the leak is truly an internal iOS build, it likely includes some of Apple's own analysis tools that are never released publicly, says Patrick Wardle, an Apple security researcher at the enterprise management firm Jamf "The rest of iOS 14 will be out in beta shortly," Wardle says, "but in my opinion having access now to internal content—security tools, tests, and fuzzer—would be the most valuable part of the leak to security researchers." A fuzzer is a tool for seeing how software handles invalid or unlikely inputs, helpful for heading off unintended behavior.

Regardless, both the leak and the jailbreak of a current iOS version indicate a shift in the atmosphere surrounding iOS security.

When asked if the jailbreak released on Saturday would work in iOS 14, Pwn20wnd said, "Depends on whether Apple manages to patch my kernel vulnerability before iOS 14 or not.