Evad3rs Address the Jailbreak Community: 'Deeply Sorry and Embarrassed About the Piracy'

The Evad3rs have posted an open letter to the jailbreak community about the controversy surrounding the iOS 7 jailbreak.

As we reported earlier, the release installs the Chinese Taig 'app store' which contains cracked applications and allegedly accesses user data. Also, the jailbreak was released without giving saurik a heads up to prepare Cydia causing numerous issues for users. More details about the situation can be found here.

The evad3rs have now posted their side of the story. Noting that "we are deeply sorry and embarrassed about the piracy that was seen today", the evad3rs said their "agreement with Taig indicates they will not have piracy in their store".


We are very upset that despite our agreement and review by their team, piracy was found in the store. It was not acceptable and they have been strenuously working to resolve the problem in good faith, and have removed all instances of it that we have brought to their attention. We are happy that it was not overlooked by the community. We've been so heads down working on the code that we didn't see this. We are sorry. We will continue to monitor this issue and work to resolve it completely. Taig will be pulled from the jailbreak if it cannot be resolved.

Taig approached the evad3rs and offered a partnership to meet the needs of the Chinese market. The evad3rs agreed to bundle the software in their app similar to how Cydia is bundled into it. According to the team, the obfuscation of the binary is to secure the integrity of the jailbreak and discourage its use by third parties, not to hide malware.

The evad3rs also address why saurik was not notified.

After we received the offer from Taig, we informed Saurik, our friend, of our decision to accept the offer. SaurikIT had been in talks with Chinese companies regarding potential partnerships, made a counteroffer. We believe they share our views on how a relationship with companies in China currently utilizing jailbreaking might benefit everyone in the community. Unfortunately, the negotiations did not work out. A few days later, we received information that SaurikIT was working with another group to release a jailbreak ahead of us. We decided to release, knowing that Cydia, MobileSubstrate, and jailbreak tweaks would be updated after a few days, just as it always has in the course of jailbreaking.


The group referenced may have been using exploits provided by geohot. You can find more details and a leaked audio tape from geohot's negotiations here.

Their full letter has been attached below for you to read.

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Dear Jailbreak Community,

We are deeply troubled by the rumors and speculation surrounding our iOS 7 jailbreak. We would like to present the whole story to you.

Most of the concern surrounds the inclusion of the Chinese App Store Taig. In the course of developing the iOS 7 jailbreak, we were approached by the company with an offer of partnership in offering Taig bundled with the jailbreak in China. Taig is a Chinese App Store written in Chinese. tailored and, we believe, well suited to meet the needs of users for the Chinese market. Users are not locked into Taig. Cydia can also be installed and Taig removed afterwards. It would be deeply hypocritical to remove choice from the user in the course of jailbreaking.

Taig has never asked us to disclose our exploits to them, let alone sell them. We were simply asked to bundle their third-party app store in China in a similar way we bundle and distribute Cydia around the world as an additional App Store, and in a similar way to how previous jailbreaks like blackra1n have bundled non-Cydia stores.

Of course, the safety and security of our users is a paramount concern, and due to the amount of close scrutiny by security professionals around the world, we offer one of the lower risk programs available for download on the Internet. We are saddened by the accusations that we would ever do such a thing, or sell weaponized exploits. If anyone ever attempted to include malware in a jailbreak, we are confident that the many security experts combing through jailbreak software would find it. The binaries are obfuscated for a similar reason to why we have in the past compiled in Cydia rather than including it as a separate file. We wish to secure the integrity of the jailbreak and discourage its use by third parties who may in fact wish to weaponize it. The obfuscation is of course not intended to deflect serious analysis by security professionals (who have quickly already fully analyzed and discussed the contents of the jailbreak), it is simply intended to prevent easy repackaging by other parties.

Preventing piracy is also extremely important to us. We are deeply sorry and embarrassed about the piracy that was seen today. All of us have spoken out vehemently against piracy in the past. We don't believe it's right for developers to not get paid for their work. In our agreement with Taig, we contractually bind them to not have piracy in their store. This was an extremely important precondition of working with them. In entering the agreement with them, we had hoped and continue to hope that our cooperation with Taig will improve the piracy situation in China. Many App Stores within China, including those run by large corporations, have many issues with pirated software. Promoting an app store that is required not to have piracy with our jailbreak, we believe, will help developers.

We are very upset that despite our agreement and review by their team, piracy was found in the store. It was not acceptable and they have been strenuously working to resolve the problem in good faith, and have removed all instances of it that we have brought to their attention. We are happy that it was not overlooked by the community. We've been so heads down working on the code that we didn't see this. We are sorry. We will continue to monitor this issue and work to resolve it completely. Taig will be pulled from the jailbreak if it cannot be resolved.

Many of you have also wondered why this jailbreak was released without Cydia and MobileSubstrate being updated for iOS 7. After we received the offer from Taig, we informed Saurik, our friend, of our decision to accept the offer. SaurikIT had been in talks with Chinese companies regarding potential partnerships, made a counteroffer. We believe they share our views on how a relationship with companies in China currently utilizing jailbreaking might benefit everyone in the community. Unfortunately, the negotiations did not work out. A few days later, we received information that SaurikIT was working with another group to release a jailbreak ahead of us. We decided to release, knowing that Cydia, MobileSubstrate, and jailbreak tweaks would be updated after a few days, just as it always has in the course of jailbreaking.

Yes, we have benefitted financially from our work, just as many others in the jailbreak community have, including tweak developers, repo owners, etc. Any jailbreak from us will always be free to the users but we believe we have a right to be compensated in an ethical way, just as any other developer. However, the interests of the community will always be the most important thing to us. When releasing the jailbreak, we pledged all our donations to foundations supporting the interests of the community. We are deeply upset at how we have inadvertently distressed the community and we are focused on fixing it.

We love the jailbreak community and you motivate us to do this work. Having a choice and freeing your device is important.

We hope you understand and we thank you for all of your support.

evad3rs
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Update:
Saurik also chimed in

So, yes: someone approached me with a potential jailbreak; the goal being to get a non-piracy-laden jailbreak out; this does not seem bad......in particular, I do not see how it is "backstabbing" @evad3rs (as some claim): it was unlikely to work, and was mostly just "having fun". Also, I am not part of @evad3rs: they made that very clear to me. They never told me anything about their exploit. Should I not help others? I guess now the argument is that if people come to me with a potential jailbreak, in order to not "backstab", I am not allowed to help them? Regardless, I gave the iOS 7 Substrate build to evad3rs on September 30th, and all I needed to test was a new copy of redsn0w (not evasion). I guess I don't understand "we really wanted TaiG's deal, so when we heard a rumor of an open jailbreak we were rushed: shame on saurik". :/