The world of insects will never cease to amaze us. Not so much because of its presence, which one can understand, as because it is sometimes almost impossible to discover a certain defect. This is the case of a strange bug which completely turn off Wi-Fi on an iPhone after connecting to a network with a very specific name.
% p% s% s% s% s% n
Go ahead, this bug is more of a curiosity than a threat. The reason is that in order for the error to occur, we need to connect to a Wi-Fi network whose name is % p% s% s% s% s% n, something that we can clearly avoid just by reading the list of available networks. We owe the information to Carl Schuo, who posted the curious discovery on Twitter.
After joining my personal WiFi with the SSID “% p% s% s% s% s% n”, my iPhone has permanently disabled its WiFi functionality. Neither restarting nor changing the SSID fixes it: ~) pic.twitter.com/2eue90JFu3
– Carl Schou (@vm_call) June 18, 2021
When an iPhone or iPad joins a network with that name, the device loses the ability to connect to any Wi-Fi network. Similarly, services like AirDrop, which rely on this network , also stop working and the error is still present even after restarting the device. Fortunately a visit to Settings > General > Restore > Reset network settings resolve the situation.
The truth is, the name of the network should at least grab some attention. In various programming languages, the% symbol followed by a character is typically used to format variables in an output string. As reflected in 9to5mac, although technical details are not available, the Wi-Fi subsystem transmits the network name to the system. As this name contains special characters, it should generate a buffer overflow, which causes memory corruption. Before that the clean the operating system security system stops the process immediately, which leaves the Wi-Fi disabled.
So far, we only have evidence of this curious string of characters as the cause of errors in Wi-Fi, however, it doesn’t hurt that we pay attention to strange symbols when connecting to networks that we do not know. Apple will surely fix this error in a future software update and it will only remain a curiosity.
