As Apple products continue to dominate the tech consumer market, many users are discovering bugs and issues with their iOS operating systems.
If users send a text message via their new iPhone containing a certain string of non-Latin characters, the phone will reboot itself and eventually come to a stop. This bug can affect Apple Watches, iPads, and Macs from working.
According to writer Samuel Gibbs for The Guardian, “the crash is caused by a bug within a core system common to all of Apple’s devices that handle text. When presented with non-Latin characters in a specific sequence – including those from Arabic, Chinese and Marathi – the CoreText system chokes, causing it to fail and bring the entire operating system to a halt.”
The text is not easily duplicated and takes knowledge of what characters can trigger the products’ response. This text message bug was discover by redditors at the subreddit “explain like i’m five”.
Mathew Hickey, principal security consultant at MDSec, told Forbes that “as the issue also affects OS X applications, a malicious party could set the triggering text as a server message of the day or welcome message, causing a user’s terminal to crash when authenticating to network services.”
This looks like one more bug that Apple has to fix. The problem may be addressed in the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus.
