1. gnabgib 1 days ago
    Discussion on upstream repo (356 points, 2022, 144 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30545425

    Related (mentions this repo): Emulating an iPhone in QEMU (268 points, 2 months ago, 64 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43592409

    1. msgodel 1 days ago
      Looking at the issue tracker it sounds like they've made significant progress since then.
      1. walterbell 1 days ago
        Progress update, https://eshard.com/posts/emulating-ios-14-with-qemu-part2

          iOS emulated in QEMU with:

  • Restore / Boot
  • Software rendering
  • Kernel and userspace debugging
  • Pairing with the host
  • Serial / SSH access
  • Multitouch
  • Network
  • Install and run any arbitrary IPA
        In other news, Cellebrite acquired Corellium iOS/Android virtualization for $170M, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44221982
        1. bri3d 1 days ago
          The eShard thing and this GitHub are fairly different, as far as I know.

          The eShard people found an earlier version of this repository and set about patching one billion parts of the iOS kernel, library cache, and userland to make it run on the limited emulator.

          Meanwhile, the actual emulator has been advancing, arguably more quickly than the eShard patch set.

          The current set of patches needed for the latest commits on this repo to run iOS are less than 10 instructions, all to enable the software-rendering/framebuffer fallback code path instead of trying to use display drivers.

          https://github.com/ChefKissInc/QEMUAppleSilicon/wiki/Filesys...

          1. bri3d 14 hours ago
            In the interest of completeness I looked deeper and there are a few more patches to the kernel and SEP OS done at emulation time:

            https://github.com/ChefKissInc/QEMUAppleSilicon/blob/6eff3ab...

            but really nothing too extensive or hard to port. It’s mostly flipping various can_has_debug returns, bypassing sigcheck, and the classic patch to flip launchd into research device mode.

          2. sheepscreek 17 hours ago
            > set about patching one billion parts of the iOS kernel, library cache, and userland to make it run on the limited emulator

            You don’t say! They’ve hacked the whole process and it feels extremely brittle. Like there’s no chance they can sustainably port this to another version of the software, let alone hardware.

          3. walterbell 22 hours ago
            Thanks for the wiki pointer.
        2. throwaway48476 1 days ago
          Presumably to build a exploit test framework.
  2. hiimwavy 19 hours ago
    This is incredibly impressive—booting an iPhone 11 all the way to Springboard in QEMU is no small feat. Kudos to the ChefKissInc team and everyone who’s contributed to getting this far!
  3. jeswin 1 days ago
    This is the ultimate emulation hack bar none - congrats to everyone involved. This also bodes well for the hackintosh project. It's may no longer be a dead end (though miles away), and eventually we might even see efficient emulation as ARM PCs become generally available.
    1. storus 1 days ago
      ARM is not an open platform like IBM PC was. See Android phones and their custom Linux kernels with undocumented parts...
  4. msgodel 1 days ago
    Woah this sounds like it boots all the way to Springboard at least! That's pretty huge!
  5. ewuhic 1 days ago
    Does it support trollstore with ability to decrypt IPAs?
    1. mywittyname 1 days ago
      For the ignorant: what does this mean?
      1. watusername 1 days ago
        Just to expand a bit on the sibling comment, IPAs downloaded from the App Store are encrypted with a DRM scheme with a key tied to the Apple account. The binaries actually stay encrypted on-disk and the OS has facilities to transparently decrypt them when executed. The usual way of decrypting is to actually execute the app, attach a debugger (normally not possible for production apps) and read the decrypted code from memory.
      2. tom1337 1 days ago
        trollstore is an inofficial app store for iOS devices which does not require a jailbreak. There are also apps that seem to decrypt the encrypted IPA (which is the file format of an iOS app) so you can view the decrypted app code and the resources. it's kinda the same as decompiling a android java app.
    2. skvmb 1 days ago
      Came here to ask this very question. This would be killer if so!
  6. xvilka 20 hours ago
    They should try to push it upstream, at least partially. Otherwise it's doomed to die like previous attempts.
  7. tifa2up 17 hours ago
    Noob question: can you install iOS apps using this?
  8. VMtest 22 hours ago
    There is still no proper documentation for using qemu on windows host, the options and arguments etc. We have to google and the info and ideas that are scattered across the internet, or referencing the Linux equivalents of it to come up with a solution
    1. Liquix 21 hours ago
      to be fair most folks playing around with qemu are probably running unix. windows has plenty of user friendly virtualization options (virtualbox, vmware, hyper-v), not to mention WSL. so windows users would probably only run qemu in hyperspecific cases like this
      1. VMtest 3 hours ago
        nope, not fair, virtualbox for example doesn't use whpx on windows while it has kvm backend on linux now

        vmware is bloated, I prefer not to register an account to download it as well. hyper-v uses FreeRDP and that requires the guest distribution to support it AFAIK, so it's not a easy out-of-the-box solution

        and I do use qemu on linux, just at the surface level, with libvirt with virt-manager, it's easy to configure with the UI

  9. dd_xplore 1 days ago
    Is it emulating iOS? Or only running iOS binaries? Why does it specifically say iPhone 11?
    1. dadoum 11 hours ago
      It's emulating iPhone 11's hardware. It runs iOS 14 and sepOS (Apple Security Enclave's firmware) on top.
    2. worldsavior 1 days ago
      Probably because it's iPhone 11 binaries.
  10. anthk 1 days ago
    How does Qemu m68k work for Classic Mac BTW?
    2. LeoPanthera 1 days ago
      Not great. Use Mini vMac instead.

      PPC emulation works fine though.

  11. seany 22 hours ago
    Seems like the important part would be emulating the security crap so it can be understood and bypassed. Where is this with that set of things? (being able to run things like banking/DMV emulated would be the killer feature)
  12. startyz 20 hours ago
    cool it is my favorite model of iphones.
    1. Minks 17 hours ago
      What makes it your favourite model specifically? I can’t really notice a lot of differences between them and I’ve used multiple devices the last 3 years.