New Exploit Breaks the iPhone's Messaging App with One Text | Hacker News Reader

New Exploit Breaks the iPhone's Messaging App with One Text

tomshardware.com

81 pointspierre-renaux35 comments

The flip side of making things opaque and "just work" per Apple philosophy, is that when they don't work, trying to fix it becomes even more difficult.

This is a very unusual "exploit", however --- according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VCard it's not even a valid .vcf file but looks to be just an RTF with copious amounts of text (appears to be bytes from PNG images concatenated together, although I haven't actually tried to read them as such.)

I think there's some sort of hidden quadratic (or higher) algorithm that's causing this, along the lines of https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/12/11/back-to-basics/ . As a datapoint, this 7-year-old machine rendered that file as RTF (in WordPad) in less than a second. An iPhone doesn't have quite as powerful a CPU, but still shouldn't be struggling to do it.

> The flip side of making things opaque and "just work" per Apple philosophy, is that when they don't work, trying to fix it becomes even more difficult.

“The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.”

— Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

Still, at least these problems are being revealed to the public alongside their fixes. It would be far worse if criminal hackers or intelligence agencies secretly exploited these issues

This seems overly alarmist given it's an exploit that simply sends the phone into a crash loop. It's not as if they can launch nukes by whistling into the microphone.

Serious question: this is the third time a exploit of this kind is publicly revealed for this app. How comes we don't see a global hack outbreak?

I mean, script kiddies would love to break millions of phones. What has stopped them from doing that so far?

Even the best script kiddie would get bloody fingers trying to type in every possible phone number or iCloud address

There's no API. No real way to automate.

A robotic auto-dialer could fix that. Perhaps an app on a jailbroken phone could inject numbers into the input field?

It'd be easier to automate the Messages app on an OS X device.

Another concern would be that Apple is likely to deactivate an ID used to send this kind of malicious spam at any sort of scale.

> Another concern would be that Apple is likely to deactivate an ID used to send this kind of malicious spam at any sort of scale.

Apple IDs can be easily remade. ProductIDs can be faked on a Hackintosh.

The part you missed was: "at any sort of scale."

I'm pretty sure you would encounter ever-increasing levels of countermeasures as you tried more and more tricks at scale.

But users will just update to the latest version if a few days, and then the juvenile fun will be over.

Messages on the mac can be automated with applescript.

    tell application "Messages"
      send "This is an iMessage" to buddy "foo@bar.com" of (service 1 whose service type is iMessage)
      send "This is an SMS" to buddy "+1234567890" of service "SMS"
    end tell

There are a number of ways to automate text messages. That's how a lot of commercial text notifications work.

Sending texts isn't free. Not many people are going to be willing to pay 5 cents a pop just to piss people off on a large scale.

Sending iMessage is 'free'

You can quite easily purchase unlimited outbound SMS from just about any local carrier in any part of the world for less than $20, either one time or monthly.

It would be very easy to mass message this to an entire country in a matter of weeks.

The motivation is pretty weak. If people found a way to make money by doing this, it would be massively exploited. But the reward for breaking a bunch of phones is... self satisfaction? ok.

I don't know that people were seriously making money on most of the script kiddie shit that was going on on the internet back before ransomware and bitcoin and such (other than AV vendors), and yet it was rampant anyway. I imagine there are still people out there who do this sort of thing "for the lulz".

I'm not so sure. Nowadays they can focus their energies on profitable activities like ransomware or adware. If you're going to break the law to cause grief anyway, why not make some money while you're at it?

Because extortion is a separate crime.

It's really just a temporary and pretty easily reverted DoS, so it's more of an annoyance than anything of a serious security exploit.

Can't say factually it would work here, but this makes me pine for the days of Blackberry Desktop Manager and its very granular backup/wipe/restore abilities.

I no longer do IT support for mobile devices, so I'm not sure what the current abilities are, but when I stopped in ~2012 the only options for both iPhones and Android were basically full wipes and restores. All or nothing. With the Blackberry you could backup/wipe/restore only SMS, or only contacts, or only calendar, etc. Could also easily transfer exactly the data you wanted to a new phone.

Yup. Apple's tech support insisted that the reason my iPhone 6 (not a 6s) shut off at 30-40% was due to a software issue, not a battery issue. They suggested I not only wipe my phone, but set it up as a brand new device. It's insane that this is the only way to fix something they claim to know is a software issue.

This is their default response to everything. Once you go through that step (and they maybe grab diagnostics to determine you actually started as new), they will actually push to resolve your issue. It's easy to recover from this w/ iTunes or iCloud device backups, so a moderately painless hoop to jump through.

Rofl this is the first time I've ever read something that refers to "wipe your device" as a "moderately painless hoop to jump throigh".

This is customer service these days?

I can backup, wipe my device, do the test, pull the debug logs, and restore from backup in an hour or so. iTunes and iCloud make it really easy to do this. It's just not cost effective for Apple to treat every case as a special snowflake if nuking from orbit fixes the issue. It sucks, but it's not like you'll get support from anywhere else.

They did that to me too. I ended up going to a 3rd party and having the battery replaced no problem. Worked great!

They've admitted to a hardware fault and have a replacement program. Got my battery replaced and haven't had the problem again.

That's for the 6s, not the 6.

Annoyance but at least not a backdoor but this will still end up yahoo click bait sounding more serious than it is for a few weeks since it's Apple related.

Url changed from http://www.tomshardware.com/news/exploit-iphone-message-sing..., which points to this.

The new URL does not allow viewing unless you disable your ad blocker.

Add the following to your filters to make it work (tested with uBlock origin):

    ! 31/12/2016, 19:57:03 https://vincedes3.com/crash-message-app-iphone/
    vincedes3.com###rba2

Ok, changed back from https://vincedes3.com/crash-message-app-iphone/.

Link I posted from the author of the exploit yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13284872

I guess the ad blocker blocker killed that...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com