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  • iPhone SMS vuln could let HAX()RZ run errant code

    John Biggs

    Biggs is the East Coast Editor of TechCrunch. Biggs has written for the New York Times, InSync, USA Weekend, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Money and a number of other outlets on technology and wristwatches. He is the former editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.com and lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. You can Tweet him here and G+ him here. Email him directly at... → Learn More

    Thursday, July 2nd, 2009

    hacker
    Security Researcher Charlie Miller has found an SMS vulnerability that can make the iPhone 3G or 3GS run unsigned code over SMS. No real details, just some vague “agreement with Apple” against describing the exploit, but it seems like a doozy:

    Most often used to send brief text messages between cell phones, SMS can also send binary code to an iPhone, which then processes the code without any user interaction. Each SMS message is limited to 140 bytes, but longer sequences can be sent to the phone as multiple messages that are automatically reassembled.

    This feature allows larger programs to be delivered to a phone, Miller said.

    That’s gotta be a lot of SMSes, right? 140 characters doesn’t hold a lot of logic bomb, let alone do something like this:

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