New Character Vulnerability Affects iPhones and iPads, Resetting Springboard

TapTechNews August 22nd news, network security researcher Konstantin discovered that a new character vulnerability can cause iPhones and iPads to crash. After sliding to the App Library, entering ::  four characters in the search box will lead to the Springboard resetting, and the iPhone will return to the lock screen interface. The reset is not a complete restart, and the iPhone can return to normal in just a few seconds.

In the settings application search interface, entering the same characters will cause the settings application to crash, but entering it in the Spotlight search doesn't seem to have any impact. Tests found that the reset problem seems to only occur on devices running iOS 17, and while entering these characters on devices running iOS 18 doesn't cause a reset, it does cause some strange problems such as character disappearance and settings application crashes.

In fact, only entering : and any other character can trigger the crash, so the problem is related to the first three characters in the four-character sequence.

TapTechNews noticed that in the past, similar character vulnerabilities have spread through messaging applications and can crash other people's iPhones. However, this time the problem is relatively small because iPhone users need to manually enter (or paste) the relevant characters into the search interface, and currently it seems impossible to affect iPhones through messaging or other text messaging platforms.

Apple should solve this problem through an iOS update in the near future.