The exploit as described doesn't "brick" the device; that would require permanently disabling it. A tethered restore would be all that's required to recover in this case.
How a single line of code could brick your iPhone
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Re: How a single line of code could brick your iPhone
#32Great work! This is my favourite type of vulnerability, simple, effective and brutal. Reminds me of a time two decades ago when with a friend from uni we theorised about a perfect server vulnerability where you’d exploit a machine by pinging it. And of course, two years ago it was in fact discovered as CVE-2022-23093.
Ping of death was already a thing two decades ago. https://web.archive.org/web/19981206105844/http://www.sophis...
It was actually almost 3 decades ago, making me feel extremely old - the period right at the end of '96 and into mid '97 when this was a popular way to cause mischief via IRC was truly a magical time
Re: How a single line of code could brick your iPhone
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ping of death was already a thing two decades ago. https://web.archive.org/web/19981206105844/http://www.sophis...
This link doesn’t show me anything useful.
Re: How a single line of code could brick your iPhone
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only if their modem didn’t implement the Hayes command set properly or you could otherwise control the per-character timing of the OS sending. It required a pause (1sec by default), “+++” with no pauses, another pause, _then_ the ATH command
Commas provided 2 second pauses
Only in the dial string to ATD, surely?
Re: How a single line of code could brick your iPhone
#35Doesn't this imply that third-party apps with their own notification schemes could be impersonated similarly? They wouldn't be able to brick the phone, obviously, but they could potentially trigger other actions.
Re: How a single line of code could brick your iPhone
#36The exploit as described doesn't "brick" the device; that would require permanently disabling it. A tethered restore would be all that's required to recover in this case.
From observation, "brick" has evolved, as things do in language. In practice, it rarely means the traditional definition you refer to, but the softer one used here.
Re: How a single line of code could brick your iPhone
#37The exploit as described doesn't "brick" the device; that would require permanently disabling it. A tethered restore would be all that's required to recover in this case.
From observation, "brick" has evolved, as things do in language. In practice, it rarely means the traditional definition you refer to, but the softer one used here.
Almost like a "soft"-brick, if you would.
Re: How a single line of code could brick your iPhone
#38The exploit as described doesn't "brick" the device; that would require permanently disabling it. A tethered restore would be all that's required to recover in this case.
From observation, "brick" has evolved, as things do in language. In practice, it rarely means the traditional definition you refer to, but the softer one used here.
Also, although HN readers probably have many devices in their homes there are people out there who have only a phone and no computer. For them this would be pretty catastrophic. Hopefully they’d take their device to Apple or a third party technician
Re: How a single line of code could brick your iPhone
#39 > That single line of code was enough to make the device enter “Restore in Progress”.
> as established before, any process could send the notification and trick the system into entering that mode.
Re: How a single line of code could brick your iPhone
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
From observation, "brick" has evolved, as things do in language. In practice, it rarely means the traditional definition you refer to, but the softer one used here.
Almost like a "soft"-brick, if you would.
You could say the device was pillowed. :D Although given the typical behaviour of old phone batteries, I guess that’s a little ambiguous.