iOS Crushing Bug on Typing "Taiwan" was due to code to "appease China": Researcher

An iOS bug found by NSA's former security researcher, Patrick Wardle, crashed the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch users in some areas every time they typed Taiwan into iMessage , Facebook, WhatsApp or any other application. emoji flag. The denial of service bug was live in iOS 11.3 and was seen affecting an iPhone 7 device, but, Apple has released a fix with the iOS 11.4.1 update released a few days ago. Wardle notes that while digging into the code for possible problems, he discovered that various codes with faulty instructions were checking the user's language / locale settings for China.

The bug (CVE-2018-4290) also had a fix, and it was to go and move your region on the iPhone from China to the United States, and then change it to China . Wardle notes in a blog post documenting the bug, that Apple had added code to remove the emoji from the Taiwan flag of the emoji keyboard to appease the Chinese government. Emojipedia also confirms this on his site saying: "This flag is hidden from the emoji keyboard on iOS devices where the region is set to China. Chinese iPhones will not display this flag and will display a missing tofu character. " [19659002] Wardle said the code written to remove references to the word and the emoji flag was buggy, and that's what caused the crash. He added, "And if Apple had not tried to appease the Chinese government in the first place, there would be no bug!"

Apple recognizes just as much in its changelog for CVE-2018-4290, "Impact: Processing an emoji under certain configurations can lead to a denial of service Description: A denial of service problem has been resolved with a improved memory processing. "Wardle noted that the bug only affected devices in certain" no region "configurations.

China is the most populous country and the largest smartphone market in the world, and Apple would make an extra effort to satisfy the broad target audience. But this iOS bug highlights that the company is also trying to appease the government on some occasions. "Although Apple likes to exhale the aura of" users first ", the reality is that they are primarily a business and that, therefore, their primary goal is always the profit ", note Wardle

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