While wanting to do some iOS security research and inspired by the work done by zhuowei, I decided to try and get this emulation project further along the boot process. The goal was to get the system to boot without having to patch the kernel beforehand or during the boot process, have new modules that extend QEMU’s capabilities to execute arm64 XNU systems and, get an interactive bash shell. This post is the first post in a 2-post series, in which I will present instructions for executing iOS on QEMU and launching an interactive bash shell. In the second post, I will detail some of the research that was required in order to get there. For this project, the iOS version and device that were chosen are iOS 12.1 and iPhone 6s Plus, because this specific iOS 12 image comes with a lot of symbols exported in the kernel image compared to other iOS kernel images that are usually stripped of most symbols.

source: grugq