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Comment by stcredzero | Hacker News Reader

1. Is probably a lot more desirable than the smartphone OS looking like trash, requiring a reboot. iOS has suffered epidemics of people trolling by sending out messages that crash processes on other's phones.

2. Since this has happened several times at this point, the point is moot. Since this is familiar territory, why not log it and have the system tell HQ something weird happened?

3. May have been true in the past. Very doubtful at this point.

4. Irrelevant. The process can have the UI, crash, then be restarted by the other process. There is no validation done by the other process. The 2nd process only detects that the 1st process has crashed, then removes the offending datum from the queue.

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> 2. Since this has happened several times at this point, the point is moot. Since this is familiar territory, why not log it and have the system tell HQ something weird happened?

This has real privacy considerations. I would rather Apple not simply get a message sent to me forwarded to them. Is the trade off worth it in this case? That's not so easy to pick for all ~1/2 billion or so users.

You could let the user decide with buttons on the error dialogue. Lot's of crash reporters use this pattern.

I would rather Apple not simply get a message sent to me forwarded to them. Is the trade off worth it in this case? That's not so easy to pick for all ~1/2 billion or so users.

All Apple would need to get is the notification that there was a crash. It could be left to the user if the crashed message gets forwarded.

What sort of useful information would that even provide? It would just show that the system crashed because of a text. You'd still have to send some sort of contextual information about the text, which itself would carry non-metadata information about the text (ie, components of the text's contents).

> (ie, components of the text's contents)

Which may then crash the prompt asking if it can send the crash...

Just send the metadata and the hex dump.

What sort of useful information would that even provide?

If it's a widespread attack, then the traffic analysis would still be useful. A hex dump of the offending data could be sent.

> The 2nd process only detects that the 1st process has crashed, then removes the offending datum from the queue.

Thereby hiding away the problem, diminishing the urgency of a fix while strongly favouring it's exploitation. Something that's just a DOS in an ASLR environment escalates to a remotely exploitable hole where the atacker can iterate untill they get the correct offset.

Unless a process is expected to crash or terminate by design, automatic respawning is not a good security practice.

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