iOS bug lets people crash others' iPhones by sending them one line of text

Sending the letters in a text message causes the phone to crash and then power off, leaving the Messages app unusable once the iPhone turns back on. Users have found a way of fixing the problem once it has happened, but there appears to be no way to keep phones from being vulnerable to it happening again.

If users open the Messages app and the problem text is still open, users can just send a reply to fix the problem. If it's not, users must either receive a message or send a message to themselves, using Siri or by texting from the "share" option that can be found in many apps.

The problem appears to come from the way that the phone tries to show the message in notifications. The characters cause that system to break, so that it briefly tries to show it before crashing and then re-setting the phone in an attempt to fix it.

It doesn't turn it off, it just crashes it. If ur jailbroken, it sends you to safe mode and if ur non-jailbroken, it just resprings your device.

effective.

Power

لُلُصّبُلُلصّبُررً ॣ ॣh ॣ ॣ 冗

Send that to someone with an iPhone it turns their phone off

Copy all above the line and text it to another iPhone and it will shut it off.

I wonder what other things we can control with this, rather than just "power off the device."

Any ideas?

Edit 1: you don't need that first line, plus i fixed it

edit 2: a list of things we discovered so far

• it only seems to work if your phone is not on safe mode
• on a jailbroken phone it shoots you into safe mode...could means that it might be related to a Springboard vulnerability
• it doesn't work if the person you are sending is looking at your texts, they can be anywhere else on their iPhone

edit 3: something i've noticed, apple changes the api with every new ios, right? maybe it has something to do with that?

edit 4: what's weird is I'm on iOS 8.1.2 and it crashes my phone as well...

edit 5: we found out what it is. it is due to how the banner notifications process the Unicode text. The banner briefly attempts to present the incoming text and then "gives up" thus the crash creds to /u/sickestdancer98

The text was found by Reddit users, who also discovered how the problem was affecting phones. The issue seems to have been around since iOS 6, users said, which was released in 2012.

Apple's engineers are aware of the problem and are looking to fix it, according to Twitter users. Members of the site also found what was going on to make it work.