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Comment by romaaeterna | Hacker News Reader

Speaking as an ex-Apple employee, I'll just point out that a really malicious actor could have used this to harm some significant percentage of the installed iOS infrastructure, and done critical damage to Apple as a company with it. In fact, I don't know the percentage of users still on <12.3, but maybe they still could. A band-aid fix for this one bug should not be where they stop here.

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What they should also do is block the malformed message from being sent too. Not sure how to do that, since iMessages are encrypted in transit, but I'm sure there's some way.

Apple controls the CA; it's pretty straight forward for them to check contents.

iMessage really could have been something great (despite apple controlling CA) if they had just opened it up for more devices. Instead WhatsApp wiped the floor with them.

>Apple controls the CA; it's pretty straight forward for them to check contents.

and in the process eavesdrop on everybody's messages? no thanks.

What? No Apple cannot decrypt messages so cannot check the content.

Messages are not encrypted to Apples keys they’re only encrypted to recipient device keys - there is no way for Apple to filter any content without removing the end to end encryption of iMessage, which Apple does not want to do - every bit of user content that Apple can decrypt increases the value in compromising Apple’s service infrastructure.

That sounds like code for "Apple can push an update without user consent"

or...

"Apple can turn off imessage to users with OS < 12.3 until users update"

They're (Apple) rather lucky that their user base vehemently upgrades whenever possible.

I've iPhone user I've ever met outside tech circles avoids installing OS updates. They end up updating soon anyway for a variety of reasons (some updated apps stop working, update occurs "on its own" overnight, to get rid of of the notification icon, and so on).

It does help that the process is pretty painless. And at least for me, a good excuse to do a reboot - which I really do as seldom as possible on my laptop and iphone.

> A band-aid fix for this one bug should not be where they stop here.

What do you suggest they do?

they can force-push emergency fixes

This isn't easy on iOS, and that doesn't sound like a particularly good idea anyways.

Would it not be possible to detect malformed messages, and prevent them from being sent to a phone in the first place?

No idea; it might be that Apple can't detect these because they're encrypted.

Yes, they're encrypted in transit.

The easiest thing that occurs to me would be a on-phone "message virus scanner" that self-updates and checks incoming messages against a threat database after decryption, but before passing them to the rest of the system.

Architecture-wise some thought should be given to keeping iOS from being DoS'd by the crash/respawn of any service.

Also, looking at the "assuming it's a string" line from the problem description, Apple needs to make an investment look through the codebase for this same error in other guises.

That's what occurs to me off the top of my head anyway.

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