iOS and Watch Notification bug

wkleem

There is something to be aware of now which is that extended characters in messages have been show to crash the devices (Mac, iPad, Watch, iPhone) when the messages are shown in Notification on a locked phone. A patch is forthcoming.

"When the text message is displayed by a banner alert or notification on the lockscreen, the system attempts to abbreviate the text with an ellipsis. If the ellipsis is placed in the middle of a set of non-Latin script characters, including Arabic, Marathi and Chinese, it causes the system to crash and the phone to reboot."

"“Programming errors in Unicode decoding and rendering will produce more errors like this, some of which may be exploitable to access elevated privilege levels on devices,” said Ken Simpson chief executive of spam filtering and email security company MailChannels. “Such a vulnerability/exploit is not yet in the wild, but if developed this would represent an immediate and severe threat to all iOS device users worldwide.”"

theguardian.com/technology/2015/may/27/iphone-crash-bug-text-imessage-ios

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AGAlumB

@wkleem: Ouch. Thanks for the heads up! I remember a similar crash in iOS Messages a while back. My wife didn't appreciate that. :naughty:

wkleem

@brenty, it could have been worse. Like being stuck in an endless crash cycle loop as long as you're within range!

AGAlumB

Indeed. :dizzy:

wkleem

Hi

It appears that Twitter is also affected by the iOS Messaging bug.

AGAlumB

I would assume that many apps using standard iOS APIs would be affected, depending on whether this is a CoreText or TypeKit problem (it wasn't clear from the article). :(