Typing just four characters could crash your iPhone

TechCrunch initially spotted this weird OS bug — but thankfully, it doesn’t seem to represent a security risk. It can only be leveraged by iPhone users to annoy themselves.

Earlier this week, Konstantin, a security researcher and lead pentester for German security firm USD AG, posted on infosec.exchange the details of an iOS bug that causes Springboard — the app that manages the iPhone’s home screen — to crash.

As others pointed out in the InfoSec thread, this works by typing “”: followed by any other character. Konstantin then expanded on the first post to explain that any string of characters following the regular expression pattern ^”.*”:. triggers the crash.

ZDNET verified that typing those characters into the Search bar in the Settings app on an iPhone running iOS 17 does crash Springboard. It also crashes the phone when entered into the App Library search bar, and puts you back to the lock screen when Springboard resets. 

On iPhones running iOS 18 beta, this causes Settings to crash and the iPhone to go back to the Home screen, but it doesn’t seem to have any effect on the App Library.

There’s no evidence that this can be used for any malicious activity, and it only causes the crash when users manually type the characters into the search boxes. 

There’s been no word from Apple on this issue yet, but we can likely expect a fix in the next batch of iOS updates.