Security researcher Charlie Miller revealed at the SyScan conference that the iPhone has some serious security issues in how it handles text messaging. Remember how all the text entered in Android ran as if it were in the command line? Well, it’s something like that, except the SMS system in the iPhone OS handles information in such a way that it “allows an attacker to run software code on the phone that is sent by SMS over a mobile operator’s network.” Fortunately, Miller has handed the data over to Apple, so a fix should be coming along in iPhone OS 3.1 that patches this (or so we hope).
Given the massive number of iPhones out there, this security risk is sort of scary. Mobile phone exploits are generally few and far between because there are so many phone operating systems. But with the iPhone, a whole bunch of users have converged onto the same platform. So for the leet haxors of the world who want to harm as many people as possible, harming a whole mess of iPhone users is a very attractive prospect.
