A bizarre bug can mess up your iPhone’s WiFi, however there is a repair

There is a bug that makes it pretty trivial for somebody to trigger issues with Wi-Fi on iOS gadgets. Found by safety researcher Carl Schou, all it takes is making a public Wi-Fi hotspot with a particularly crafted title, and when somebody with an iOS gadget connects to it, increase: Their Wi-Fi is disabled.

The bizarre factor about this bug is that it has been found and publicly shared a number of weeks in the past, and there is nonetheless no phrase a few repair coming.

Schou initially tweeted concerning the concern on June 19. If an iOS gadget connects to a Wi-Fi community known as “%ppercentspercentspercentspercentspercentn”, its Wi-Fi will get disabled. Judging by feedback from others, what occurs from there might be fairly completely different, relying on unknown elements: Some folks have been capable of allow the Wi-Fi on their gadgets just by resetting community settings. For others — Schou included — this did not work, and neither did restarting the iPhone.

A number of retailers, together with 9to5Mac, have picked up the information again then. It seems that the bug has to do with the syntax of some programming languages, the place “%(character)” is a string format specifier. It is a pretty widespread sort of bug, the place a personality string that is utilized in programming mistakenly finally ends up someplace the place it might probably trigger hassle, inflicting an app to crash.

As others experimented with the bug, it turned out that you should use different community names to provide the identical impact; Schou proposed “%secretclubpercentpower”, and Safety researcher Alex Skalozub, who spoke with The Register, stated a reputation like “%Free %Espresso at %Starbucks” would additionally work.

Tweet could have been deleted

This makes the problem a bit extra severe, because it’s pretty simple to concoct a Wi-Fi community title that feels like one thing you’d need to hook up with. Although it does not seem the bug can be utilized to steal your knowledge or something nefarious like that, a prankster might arrange a public Wi-Fi community that might mess up the iPhones of everybody that linked to it — and with the appropriate title, it might soak up lots of people.

Bringing this story again into consideration was Schou’s tweet on Sunday that he nonetheless hasn’t been capable of repair his Wi-Fi. In the end, he did it by manually modifying an iPhone backup, and eradicating the offending Wi-Fi community names from the “identified networks” .plist — one thing a typical iPhone consumer definitely is not desperate to do. One other consumer suggests eradicating the offending Wi-Fi community title from iCloud Keychain on a Mac.

Whereas it is comforting to know {that a} repair for this bug exists, it might be good if Apple mounted it on their finish. Schou says he contacted Apple concerning the concern however hasn’t heard again. We have finished the identical and can replace this text after we hear from Apple.