Apple targets jailbreaking in lawsuit against iOS virtualization company

Enlarge / An image from Apple's lawsuit shows a real iPhone X and Corellium's service running a virtual iPhone X. (credit: Apple)

Apple has expanded a lawsuit against an iOS virtualization company, claiming that its actions facilitate jailbreaking and violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) prohibition on circumvention of copyright-protection systems.

Apple sued Corellium, a company that sells access to virtual machines that run copies of the operating system used in iPhones and iPads, in August 2019. We detailed the initial allegations in a previous article; Apple said that Corellium sells "perfect replicas" of iOS without a license from Apple and markets its software as "a research tool for those trying to discover security vulnerabilities and other flaws in Apple's software." But instead of aiding good-faith security research, Corellium "encourages its users to sell any discovered information on the open market to the highest bidder," Apple alleged.

The first version of Apple's lawsuit accused Corellium of copyright infringement. A new version filed on December 27 alleges both copyright infringement and "unlawful trafficking of a product used to circumvent security measures in violation of 17 U.S.C. 1201," a statute that's part of the DMCA. Apple argued that Corellium gives users the ability to jailbreak iOS for either benign or malicious purposes.

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