A security researcher has found a bug in iOS that could lead the iPhone to crash when a certain sequence of characters was typed into the phone.
This week a security researcher on Mastodon found that typing these characters into Spotlight Search or App Library will crash your iOS device. The characters are: “”::
This will either allow your phone to freeze or reboot. This is not a major security issue for the device as the bug is triggered by users by manually typing the characters.
9to5Mac tested this on multiple devices with different iOS versions. They found that in the latest version of iOS 17 when typing these characters, the Springboard crashes and goes for a soft reboot. Springboard is the iPhone home screen interface.
Typing these characters in iOS 18 and iOS 18.1 causes the Spotlight Search to freeze very briefly but it does not crash the Springboard fully.
This problem only occurs when you type in the Spotlight search from your iPhone’s home screen or the App Library search bar.
This is not the first time this kind of bug has affected iOS devices. Back in 2015, a major effective power bug caused the Messages app to crash and iPhones to reboot when a specific text was received. That time, the problem was more severe as someone from outside could cause your device to reboot.
This time, it is not like that. This time, the bug can only be exploited by manually putting a string of characters in the Spotlight Search or the App Library search bar.
Apple has not commented on this as of yet. However, the company is usually pretty quick to address similar concerns.
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