There's yet another iOS bug that causes Apple devices to crash when they receive text messages containing a string of special characters. With further finessing, the same exploit may be able to attack Macs, since OS X is also unable to process the same combination of characters, which are technically known as glyphs.
The menacing combination of ASCII and unicode-based characters looks like this:
That change will prevent attacks that are currently circulating online, but it may not stop miscreants from finding new ways to crash people's iDevices. According to the reddit thread, messages sent over WhatsApp may also trigger the crash. And depending on the way individual apps parse Unicode glyphs, other programs may do the same thing. The bug can also trip up OS X, although the attack requires a target to concatenate or paste a malicious file into the Mac terminal, according to a researcher who goes by the Twitter handle Hacker Fantastic.
Hacker Fantastic has tweeted a variety of other interesting technical details. The bug, he reported, resides in a part of the operating system that processes Unicode glyphs and causes a string to be written to a particular memory location. The bug is tied to the way banner notifications process Unicode, reddit reader sickestdancer98 reported. The banner is unable to display the text and eventually crashes the entire OS.While the bug is rightfully regarded primarily as a nuisance, denial-of-service vulnerabilities can often be the result of serious flaws that, with more work, can be exploited to perform code-execution attacks. And even when more malicious exploits aren't possible, DoS holes can sometimes present opportunities for extortionists or people looking to disrupt large events—for instance people at a conference. Expect Apple to release a patch in the coming week or so.
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