Apple iOS in the Doghouse Again

iOS devices running 14.7 through 15.2 – basically all devices – are subject to a denial of service attack that forces the user to do a factory reset, wiping all of the user’s data.

If the user logs in to iCloud to restore the data, the denial of service attack will replay once the data is restored, resulting in a “rinse and repeat” cycle.

Apple was told about the bug last August but has not mitigated it. As a result, the researcher who discovered it has publicly disclosed it and created a proof of concept app to demonstrate it.

Apple has repeatedly said that they would fix it, but have not.

The bug is related to the Homekit software, which does home automation and, apparently, it does not matter whether you are doing any home automation or not. If the hacker manages to create a device name of more than 500,000 characters, which can be done in a number of ways, the iDevice goes into cardiac arrest.

For more technical details on how the attack works, read the article at the link.

Since all good attacks need a catchy name, this one is called DoorLock.

Apple did quietly create a partial mitigation in 15.1, if you know about it and use it. The attack creates a device name of more than 500,000 characters, causing the iDevice to go belly-up. There is a way to limit the device name length, but it is not set by default (why?). My guess is that maybe a half dozen Apple employees have set this to protect themselves.

One bright spot is that the hacker would either need to have access to your “home” or get you to manually accept an invitation to one. The second seems easier than the first, using a pretty vanilla social engineering scam.

If you don’t have your data backed up, you are, as they say, in a world of trouble.

There is a way, if you know what is going on, to mitigate the “rinse and repeat” loop to restore your data from iCloud, so all is not lost, but it could be very stressful.

You are now warned Credit: Bleeping Computer

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