Just one day after Apple’s hotly anticipated Vision Pro headset started landing in customers’ hands, MIT PhD student Joseph Ravichandran has already discovered a way to hack the device’s kernel—the core of its operating system.
On Friday evening, Ravichandran took to social media to reveal what appears to be the first publicly disclosed kernel exploit for visionOS, Vision Pro’s new spatial computing platform. He showed off an app he created specifically to crash the brand-new $3,499 headset.
With the tap of a button labeled “Crash My Vision Pro” adorned with an emoji wearing a Vision Pro, Ravichandran’s app causes the headset to abruptly reboot. After 30 seconds of darkness, the Vision Pro restarts in full pass-through mode, warning the user that the system needs to recover.
Ravichandran, who studies Microarchitectural Security at MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, also shared snippets of what looks to be the Vision Pro’s crash log. When asked whether he discovered the underlying exploit himself, he simply replied, “Yes, I found it.”
Kernel exploits are pivotal to the jailbreaking community—the hackers who “jailbreak” devices to run unauthorized apps and modifications locked down by Apple’s software. So far, Ravichandran hasn’t indicated plans to release details of his Vision Pro hack publicly or make a jailbreak tool.
But given the myriad security mechanisms Apple has put in place specifically to prevent jailbreaking, the existence of this exploit just 24 hours after the Vision Pro’s launch is notable. If Ravichandran or other hackers are able to find additional ways to disable protections like XTRR, PPL, and PAC, a Vision Pro jailbreak could eventually become feasible.
For now, it seems buyers have scarcely had time to unbox their $3,499 headsets before one intrepid PhD student has already cracked it open in more ways than one. Ravichandran’s rapid discovery is a bold early warning to Apple about the device’s security integrity long-term.
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