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iMessage: Malformed Message Bricks iPhone

bugs.chromium.org

121–130 of 279 posts

Re: iMessage: Malformed Message Bricks iPhone

#121
post #7

This is fixed in iOS 12.3 [1] and macOS 10.14.5 [2], both released on May 13th. As Natalie noted on the ticket, turning off iMessage will also prevent the bug. [1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210118 [2]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210119

Turning off iMessage to prevent the bug is like turning off a car to prevent to consume petrol.. what a solution

... if you live in America.

Re: iMessage: Malformed Message Bricks iPhone

#123
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reasoning is that once a fix is out, by making it public then users can know about it and intentionally update their devices if they haven't yet.

Sounds good in theory. In reality, the vast majority of iPhone users are not aware that this bug exists and never will be. The best action for user safety is to wait until the period has elapsed or the exploit has been seen in the wild already. Alternatively, they could publish the gist of the exploit without providing enough detail to actually perform the exploit.

Publishing the gist of the exploit, combined with access to diffs of the patch should be enough for people to reverse engineer the exploit.

Re: iMessage: Malformed Message Bricks iPhone

#124
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turning off iMessage to prevent the bug is like turning off a car to prevent to consume petrol.. what a solution

Where I live nobody uses iMessage so this sounds like a good workaround :P (Yes yes I know it’s been patched already...)

second that. half of my friends using iphones dont enable imessage. thus penetration (in my circles) is way too low to make it useful.

Re: iMessage: Malformed Message Bricks iPhone

#125

Yet another wrong use of the word bricked. Bricked means bricked and you can’t ever come back from that.

No, it's not as simple as that. People use brick to mean slightly different things - sometimes they say hard/soft bricked instead of bricked. And you'll even find some people who say what you say but admit that it was still the correct word to describe devices which can only be fixed by disassembling the hardware and using jtag, which "brick extremists" probably wouldn't allow.

Re: iMessage: Malformed Message Bricks iPhone

#127
post #4

I cannot load this page on android Firefox without it immediately crashing Firefox. Fairly topical.

Works in my FF 67.

Works on my FF 69 as well, but the text select behavior is weird at best.

The page did NOT work on my Edge 44, even after disabling uBlock.

Re: iMessage: Malformed Message Bricks iPhone

#128

Yet another wrong use of the word bricked. Bricked means bricked and you can’t ever come back from that.

This definition never holds up to scrutiny.

For example, if I pull out my EPROM writer, de-solder the chips, and update them almost no device is truly "bricked" by this definition. The only exceptions would be burned update fuses or similar physical damage. Making the definition itself extremely niche, to the point of being synonymous with "physically damaged/destroyed."

I myself stick to the broader "technologically as useful as a brick" definition. Which a boot-looping iPhone absolutely fits. The fact there are ways to recover it is neither here nor there.

I generally call what you're describing a "Hard Brick." But even those are sometimes recoverable via as I said chip re-programming.

Re: iMessage: Malformed Message Bricks iPhone

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the comments on the bug has the answer: For testing purposes, there are three ways that I found to unbrick the device: 1) wipe the device with 'Find my iPhone' 2) put the device in recovery mode and update via iTunes (note that this will force an update to the latest version) 3) remove the SIM card and go out of Wifi range and wipe the device in the menu

Instead of wiping the phone, couldn’t you just disable iMessage once you habe removed the SIM card and are out of WiFi range?

Would that mean you could not use iMessage any more (without the patch)? An iPhone without iMessage is significantly redundant, at least in N.America.

Re: iMessage: Malformed Message Bricks iPhone

#130
post #34

This brings back old memories from hardening the sms/text parsers of feature phones of yesteryear. There it wasn’t entirely uncommon that when you sent a malformed sms-deliver PDU (e.g. text message) to the phone and crashed parser that tried to decode it, it took also the phone down before it could ack the message back to SMSC. Which of course meant that as soon as phone was turned on and it registered to network, t…

Fascinating problem. Since I have Faraday cages on the mind today (not that I know much more than ~10 minutes of reading)... simply isolating the phone from all signals would block both the message and any software update, so that doesn't work. But what if you attached it to wifi but not to the cell network? Either have the wifi router (itself having a wired connection) and the phone in the same shield; or, I guess, people say Faraday cages target certain wavelengths, so if wifi and cell tower are sufficiently different, maybe you could have a selectively blocking Faraday cage. Would that have been workable? (non-EE here)
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