Cydia Impactor - Unjailbreak your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch running iOS 8.3 or 8.4!

Rook · July 19, 2015

The jailbreak community is in for some great news, as Saurik (the founder of Cydia) has just released the Cydia Impactor, which allows jailbreakers to unjailbreak iPhone without updating the iOS software to the latest iteration.

Cydia Impactor is a device management utility that currently has two features: one in the desktop version and one in the mobile version.

I released the first version of Impactor in 2013 for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X with one feature: to jailbreak Android devices using the "Master Key" exploit.

This is the "mobile" version of Cydia Impactor, which currently has a different feature: to remove and revert all changes made to the device and return it to "stock" Apple iOS software without updating to a new version of iOS.

(It might seem confusing that these tools have the same name, but they're both device management tools and are both built from the same code base.)

The biggest advantage with this tool is its ability to restore the device to stock settings without the need to upgrade iOS and thereby preserve the privilege of jailbreaking, as newer iOS versions already have patched up known exploits used in existing jailbreaks.

As iDownloadBlog notes, the ability to re-jailbreak an iPhone increases its resale value as normal restore procedures will forcibly upgrade your device to the latest firmware, which will remove the ability to re-jailbreak when need arises.

How does it work?
(This section is all technical information only for those curious: feel free to skip.)

Impactor uses the firmware archives provided by Apple for its "over the air" update feature. These files are ~2GB large, so Impactor goes to extreme lengths to minimize the amount of data it needs to download: most recoveries will require less than 10MB of transfer.

First, the update's "bill of materials" is compared against the files on your device, generating a list of changes.

Then, all files on your device that have been modified or otherwise destroyed are downloaded directly from Apple.

In a series of carefully calculated file migrations, all new files are moved to the user partition, and all system data is moved back to the system partition.

Up until this point, the idea is that no changes to your system have been made that are "unsafe": at any point, if Impactor fails/crashes or your device reboots, you can just run it again later.

Finally, all of the staged changes to the filesystem are "committed", all user data is deleted, and iOS is told to run its "reset all content and settings".

The idea is that this "critical window" lasts only the final few seconds of a process that lasts for multiple minutes.

(That said, I still highly recommend not at all "messing with" the app while it is running, and maybe if you have a lot of data this will take longer than I expect.)

When the device reboots, it will look as it did when you first turned it on; it will also no longer be "jailbroken": if you want to jailbreak it, you will need to do so using a desktop jailbreaking tool.

More Info:

https://cydia.saurik.com/info/com.saurik.impactor/

Video:

abidfaster · July 19, 2015

tlahs2000k · July 19, 2015

thx

mike20036 · July 19, 2015

Thanks DiDA

Raggnar · July 19, 2015

Great!

Thanks mate

5k repo

Gratzz

Ichiryuu · July 19, 2015

Thanks DiDA.

Rook · July 19, 2015

Don't install this if you don't know what you're doing.

This isn't a fancy tweak which extends the iPhone Operating System, it simply removes the Jailbreak and Cydia Completely. Kind of like Semi-Restore but a full restore without restoring.

Kiko · July 19, 2015

THNX FOR THIS BUT DONT WORK FOR ME I TRIED MANY TIMES IN IPHONES 5S (8.3) AND IPAD 2 (8.4) BUT CRACHED IT SAID error (reset cpp1090 READ-only file system)

WHERE IS THE PROBLEM ??

Rook · July 24, 2015

THNX FOR THIS BUT DONT WORK FOR ME I TRIED MANY TIMES IN IPHONES 5S (8.3) AND IPAD 2 (8.4) BUT CRACHED IT SAID error (reset cpp1090 READ-only file system)

WHERE IS THE PROBLEM ??

You need to report all problems and issues to Saurik. The tweka is still in beta.

Isvhara · July 28, 2015

AWESEME! this is what we need after apple seriously will ban jb in iOS 9. btw do we need to erase all data after unjailbreak the device to get clean restore or this is the only step we need to get a clean one?