iOS Kernel Utilities

Beware, chances are the device will panic and reboot.

Download

Just want the binaries?
Head over to Releases. :)

Prerequisites

• Jailbroken Device
• tfp0 kernel patch (see below)
• If you don't have XCode:
  • GNU make
  • C compiler for iOS
  • Code signing utility

tfp0 compatibility

A kernel patch is required for these tools to work, since access to kernel memory is natively unavailable for obvious reasons.
That patch is normally referred to as task-for-pid-zero (short tfp0), and is included in almost every public jailbreak.

The latest release of these tools is confirmed to work with:

• p0sixspwn on 6.1.x
• Pangu on 7.1.x
• TaiG on 8.4
• Pangu9 on 9.1
• qwertyoruiop's jailbreakme on 9.3.x
• extra_recipe on 10.0-10.2
• Yalu102 (beta4 or later) on 10.0.1-10.2

Jailbreaks that DO NOT seem to enable tfp0, and thus DO NOT work with kern-utils:

• Pangu9 on 9.0.x (but can be enabled with cl0ver)
• Pangu9 on 9.2-9.3.3 (but see qwertyoruiop's jailbreakme)
• YaluX on 10.0.1-10.1.1

If you have information about how the kernel task port can be obtained in these versions, please open a ticket and tell me.

Tools

Name	Function
kdump	Dump a running iOS kernel to a file
kinfo	Display various kernel information
kmap	Visualize the kernel address space
kmem	Dump kernel memory to the console
kpatch	Apply patches to a running kernel
nvpatch	Display and patch NVRAM variables permissions

Building

git clone https://github.com/Siguza/ios-kern-utils
cd ios-kern-utils
make        # build just the binaries
make deb    # build a deb file for Cydia
make xz     # package binaries to a .tar.xz
make dist   # deb && xz

For make you may also specify the following environment variables:

Name	Function	Default value
		OS X	iOS	Linux
IGCC	iOS compiler	xcrun -sdk iphoneos gcc	clang	ios-clang
IGCC_ARCH	Target architecture(s)	-arch armv7 -arch arm64
IGCC_FLAGS	Custom compiler flags	none
LIBTOOL	Archive manipulation utility	xcrun -sdk iphoneos libtool	libtool	ios-libtool
STRIP	Symbol remover utility	xcrun -sdk iphoneos strip	strip	ios-strip
SIGN	Code signing utility	codesign	ldid
SIGN_FLAGS	Code signing flags	-s - --entitlements misc/ent.xml	-Smisc/ent.xml

macOS

As of late, kern-utils can also be compiled for and used on macOS.
Compile with:

IGCC=gcc IGCC_ARCH='-arch x86_64' SIGN=true STRIP=strip LIBTOOL=libtool make clean all

The SIGN=true is a dirty hack to skip signing, which is necessary because Sierra and later will not allow self-signed binaries with restricted entitlements to run. However, entitlements aren't needed on macOS since the kernel task port is obtained via a different API very much thanks to Jonathan Levin.

In order to use kern-utils, SIP needs to be at least partially disabled. If you don't want to disable it completely, you can use:

csrutil enable --without debug

License

MIT.

Original project by Samuel Groß.
nvpatch is largely based on nvram_patcher by Pupyshev Nikita.
Maintained and updated for iOS 8 and later by Siguza.

TODO

• Test on Linux
• Keep up with the original repo