4 wk. ago • 87%

Typing these four characters could crash your iPhone | TechCrunch

techcrunch.com Typing these four characters could crash your iPhone | TechCrunch

A bug in the iPhone makes it crash just by typing four characters.

24 comments

"": + anything in spotlight.

It crashes springboard and reloads in about half a second.

46
- it means you could type any of :
  
  “”:a “”:b “”:c ... “”:(any other characters)
  
  14
  
  For me "":: was enough to crash it instantly. Rebooted in ~3 seconds.
  
  14
- For me only works in App Library (and settings)
  
  4
- in about half a second
  
  Or more than a minute on devices that are not the latest generation.
  
  3
"You won't believe character #3!!!"

37
Sounds like SQL injection, actually more like a JSON injection... As if it's trying to concatenate the input directly inside the value of a JSON dictionary, without proper escaping and/or encoding (base64 or hex, for example).

Possibly the input is being stored for user history (and, therefore, auto completion) purposes? Be it or not, something JSON-related is taking place here, from a kernel level or sufficiently deep so to cause a kernel crash (and rebooting).

(Sorry for jargons, I'm a developer seeing this issue through a developer lens)

33
- This is not a kernel panic and associated reboot. It simply crashes the SpringBoard, which is kinda like the "desktop environment" of iOS. It's responsible for the homescreen, and calls other processes like the window server. It's a normal userspace process, not related to the kernel at all.
  
  Edit: Sorry I actually meant to link to this wiki page https://www.theiphonewiki.com/wiki//System/Library/CoreServices/SpringBoard.app
  
  10
- Yeah, since the last character can be anything, it certainly seems JSON-related. If it wasn't, SQL could be on the table (""::<input> is how you convert types).
  
  Good eye. I find it incredibly odd that JSON would be involved in any way here, but that does seem like a logical idea.
  
  2
""::

23
- I thought this was a new hip smiley I didn’t know about until I read the article :)
  
  9
  
  Spiders kissing
  
  “”:: ::“”
  
  10
Confirmed it exists even in 18.1 Beta 2. Reloads faster than I can even time it though.

15
- It's not just betas - it's in the main release, too
  
  3
  
  My thought was the reverse. Figured it was in mainline and the betas haven’t fixed it. If it gets fixed, it’d probably be in the beta first.
  
  4
There are a few YouTube videos that end up rebooting android. Forgot which ones and I'm too scared to try to recreate it.

11
iOS 18 Beta 7 it crashes and reloads back to search so fast it looks like your query is just erased. Band-aid fix maybe.

7
Stuff likes this me think that modern technology is glued together random shit that somehow works, or at least as long as you are using your phone like a zoomer or a normie which only scrolls Facebook. The moment you do something that is not done by >90% of users, you will only encounter random fucking bugs and freezes (although these also happen when normally using an app, see YouTube Music in which it takes forever to load the library while offline completely making downloading songs completely useless).

I have a moderately new mid (mid-high?) range phone (from 2021) and it's crazy how often software freezes or just glitches the fuck up, despite of running on a device that's probably millions times faster than a computer used to launch people to the fucking moon. In no period of history the technology was so unresponsive as nowadays. I think it just went worse from mid 2010's (or maybe even earlier) onwards.

6
- I work in IT as PM, you're pretty close.
  
  Modern technology is glued together NOT random shit that somehow works.
  
  Everything created has been built with a purpose, that's why it's not random. However, the longer you go on, the more rigid the architecture becomes, so you start creating workarounds, as doing otherwise takes too much time which you don't have, because you have a dozen of other more important tasks at hand.
  
  When you glue those solutions together, they work because they've been built to work in a specific use case. But it also becomes more convoluted every time, so you really need to dig to fix something you didn't account for.
  
  Then it becomes so rigid and so convoluted that to fix some issues properly, you'd have to rebuild everything, starting from architecture. And if you can't make more workarounds to satisfy the demand? You do start all over again.
  
  5
- Yup, as hardware gets better, software gets more complex and things get missed. As a developer, I feel this 100%, we just don't have time to really polish anything, so we do our best to ensure the most common paths through the software are reliable.
  
  2
“”:a

1
- “”::
  
  1
Inb4 someone screws their phone permanently

-7
- It’s just a respring, which can actually be useful in certain situations.
  
  6

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