iMessage: Malformed Message Bricks iPhone

Post by JustSomeNobody » Mon, Jul 08, 2019, 12:51 PM UTC

iamnotacrook wrote: post #125

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #122

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.

Post by davej » Mon, Jul 08, 2019, 1:07 PM UTC

rocqua wrote: post #123

davej wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by baybal2 » Mon, Jul 08, 2019, 1:13 PM UTC

rixrax wrote: 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…

Post by Zenbit_UX » Mon, Jul 08, 2019, 1:17 PM UTC

taneq wrote: post #24

zaroth wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only purpose of the word’s existence is to define an entirely unrecoverable state. Crash loop or hung on startup describes the state. It is by definition not bricked if it can be recovered.

And as my post illustrated, "unrecoverable" is entirely relative to the user's capabilities. There's no such thing as "entirely unrecoverable" to a suitably equipped and motivated person, although you get into a Ship-of-Theseus situation if enough hardware needs replacing.

Post by Zenbit_UX » Mon, Jul 08, 2019, 1:21 PM UTC

SkyBelow wrote: post #144

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I stand by words mean things. If you can recover in any way, it's not a brick. In this case it is a boot loop and there's no reason they should not have used boot loop to describe the condition.

>If you can recover in any way Physically replacing every single component, one by one, will lead to a recovery. >I stand by words mean things. They are an abstraction of thought to enable communication and external storage. A very leaky abstraction.