How to crash the iPhone with a single Telugu character by In recent years, Apple has been heavily criticized for the security implications of their market centralization and policy of irreversible operating system updates. Mobile device users are strongly pressured to install packaged iOS upgrades that cannot be rolled back. While this practice greatly increases security for most users, there is an inherent danger to this centralization. Every flaw or weakness leaves over 100 million Apple device users vulnerable to exploitation for illegal purposes. The most recent iPhone bug (CVE-2018-4124) has been wreaking havoc due to unexpected behavior when the operating system attempts to display a particular Indian character from the Telugu language. Any application that attempts to display the character on an iOS device crashes instantly, and cannot recover until the offending character is removed. The entire device crashes and restarts if the character triggers the bug in a component of the operating system, such as SpringBoard.
The bug that involves sending a particular character from Indian language Telugu to devices also affects third-party messaging apps on the platform including WhatsApp, Gmail, Twitter, Facebook Messenger etc. The bug affects iOS 11.2.5, which is the latest available version of iOS. It is also affecting devices running iOS 11.3 beta. All it takes is a single Telugu (Indian language) character sent in a message. The specific character crashes the springboard, and once your iPhone has recovered from that, the messaging app where it was received crashes every time it’s tapped. Affected apps include Messages, Facebook Messenger, Gmail, Outlook, and WhatsApps.
This can result in an endless bootloop that can only be halted by a Device Firmware Update (DFU) restore, which causes the loss of all data. Unfortunately, this frustrating bug extends beyond the iPhone; users have reported the same flaw in other devices such as iPads, the Apple Watch, and Mac computers. It is remarkable that a company with Apple's resources overlooked such a widespread bug that affects their entire product line. Introduction to Unicode characters The Unicode standard allows a wide range of languages to be consistently displayed by assigning a unique number to each character.
Consequently, text from any alphabet can be faithfully reproduced independent of language or computing platform. This universal encoding eliminates many of the misunderstandings that arise with the use of limited character sets, such as ASCII. Unicode characters are referenced in text by writing “U+” followed by the character code represented in hexadecimal format (for example, a capital “A” can be indicated by U+0041).
![Indian telugu character emoji iphone Indian telugu character emoji iphone](/uploads/1/2/5/6/125618513/516824110.jpg)
![Telugu Telugu](http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-D-_dl2OvDK8/TeZUWaEfH3I/AAAAAAAAJyo/SzuVN49HO8o/s1600/uma_telugu_supporting_actress_227.jpg)
Unicode is organized into different groups, whose characters/letters correspond to various alphabets and their writing styles. For example, this article is written with characters that belong to the group. In addition to letters, numbers, and symbols, Unicode also contains invisible “special characters” that modify how visible characters are displayed (for example: U+0020, the “space” that places a gap between two words). A complete list of Unicode characters can be found. By default, Unicode character engines write text from left to right. However, the standard must also accomodate languages such as Arabic and Hebrew that are written from right to left.
This is accomplished by including an invisible “right-to-left mark” character that encodes the appropriate alignment. The modifier signals to the device to align the text like this.
In 2015, there was a lot of fuss about a bug called Effective Power which is a series of characters that can cause iOS to crash. Now, we have something similar but it is only one character and it’s causing different iOS messaging apps to shut down. The character is in the Telugu language, a Central-Southern Dravidian language spoken in India by about 70 million people. When this character is received or pasted into a text field, it leads to a freeze of apps or a complete crash of the entire operating system. iMessage, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Gmail, and Outlook have all crashed when this symbol is used.