Over the past a number of weeks, a flaw has emerged in iOS meaning a handful of community names can truly disable Wi-Fi in your iPhone altogether. Within the newest beta of iOS 14.7, which Apple launched to builders and public beta customers yesterday, Apple has seemingly fastened this bug.
The bug in query first surfaced final month. Primarily, a safety researcher found that sure community names can utterly disable your iPhone’s potential to connect with Wi-Fi and use different networking options akin to AirDrop. In some cases, the issue was fixable by resetting your iPhone’s community settings within the Settings app, however this wasn’t at all times the case.
The repair was first reported by the YouTuber Zollotech, who detailed the change in his newest video. Now, for those who’re working iOS 14.7, once you connect with considered one of these particular Wi-Fi names, your iPhone will work as anticipated.
There’s nonetheless no element on a selected trigger, however 9to5Mac’s Benjamin Mayo speculated:
Right here’s the seemingly rationalization: the ‘%[character]’ syntax is often utilized in programming languages to format variables into an output string. In C, the ‘%n’ specifier means to save lots of the variety of characters written into the format string out to a variable handed to the string format operate. The Wi-Fi subsystem in all probability passes the Wi-Fi community identify (SSID) unsanitized to some inside library that’s performing string formatting, which in flip causes an arbitrary reminiscence write and buffer overflow. This can result in reminiscence corruption and the iOS watchdog will kill the method, therefore successfully disabling Wi-Fi for the person.
iOS 14.7 is obtainable to builders and public beta testers now, however there’s nonetheless no phrase on a public launch date. Within the meantime, remember to maintain a watch out for any Wi-Fi networks with p.c symbols of their identify. Have you ever had any run-ins with this downside? Tell us down within the feedback!
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