iOS 8 Bug - Rebooting iPhone - Unicode in iMessage

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This morning, one of my colleagues received an iMessage text from one of his friends with the following content:

“
effective.
Power
لُلُصّبُلُلصّبُررً ॣ ॣh ॣ ॣ
冗
“

Little did he know that receiving this text would shut down his iPhone. I mean…come on…who’s to tell that something as simple as a text message can have such consequences? He obviously panicked and thought it was some sort of security breach. I was the only security nerd (really?) he knew I guess because he immediately forwarded the text over to me and caused my iPhone to shut down haha. Now with my curiosity aroused, I definitely had to check what was going on.

Having been in the industry for so long, I knew the iPhone was not that easily prone to breaches and took a closer look at the message content,  Analyzing the bits, hexes and everything and anything,  I turned to our dear friend Google and viola! It looks like this text message has been doing the rounds quite a bit. This looks like iOS8 bug in handling Unicode characters from within its iMessage application. I hope and am positive that Apple would provide a solution to this in its next iterations of the iOS operating system.

For now what do you need to do? Nothing but continue using your iPhone as you do today. If I find something more about this, rest assured, you will be the first to know.

Cheers,


Venkat Alagarsamy

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