Ben
2nd January 2009, 06:16 PM
Ouch :(
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/02/cat_keynes_nokia_silence/
Did you have a quiet Christmas? What about New Year? While New Years Eve is the busiest time for text messages, maybe you didnt get any. And if you're a Nokia user, there may be a reason for that.
You might have been struck by the Curse of Silence bug that has been floating around for a while, and has been recently made public at the Chaos Computer Club. When a suitably vulnerable Nokia phone receives an SMS which has been crafted in the right way it is struck deaf and becomes unable to receive SMS text messages without a factory reset: type #7370# to do this, but youll lose everything.
And because MMS is triggered by SMS thats killed too.
How does the bug work? Text messaging has lots of buried features.There are various types of text message such as those which update your internet settings or make a voicemail icon appear. Other types include paging systems, fax and email. You can also, if you know what you are doing, fake sending an email that by putting characters with those values in the right place in a message. For email the special type is "SMS and Internet Electronic Mail interworking". One of the things which differentiates an email from a text message is you have a from address as well as a body. To allow for this the standard uses a space between the from and the message.
To make all this a bit friendlier, Nokia phones using Series 60 version 2.6 or newer scan the bit before the space to look for what might be an email address something with an @ in it. Clearly this seemed to be a good idea to the right developers at the time, but its a minor feature and didnt justify significant testing. Unfortunately if the email address is longer than 32 characters, Series 60 versions 2.6, 2.8, 3.0 and 3.1 phones go into the kind of strop most families experience at Christmas and fail to communicate. Phones with version 2.6 or 3.0 dont shrug their shoulders or slam doors. In fact they dont give any indication that anything is wrong at all. A factory reset fixes this but will take all your personal data including the games high scores you spent so long on over Christmas. If you back your phone up after youve been attacked when you restore the data you restore the problem.
Its a bit harder to deafen a version 2.8 or 3.1 phone. These need to receive 11 maliciously crafted SMS text messages and then they say that there is not enough memory to receive further messages, and something should be deleted. These phones will seem to work if you soft reset them, but the next text message of over 160 characters will kill everything again.
continues...
That's a nasty bug. Fortunately I don't think there'll be widespread exploitation of it as there's no financial incentive and, believe it or not, text messages do cost money. It wouldn't surprise me if "prank" sites pop up that'll charge you £1.50 a pop to silence a friend's (hopefully vulnerable) mobile.
It'd take a pretty evil company to broadcast a significant volume of these.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/02/cat_keynes_nokia_silence/
Did you have a quiet Christmas? What about New Year? While New Years Eve is the busiest time for text messages, maybe you didnt get any. And if you're a Nokia user, there may be a reason for that.
You might have been struck by the Curse of Silence bug that has been floating around for a while, and has been recently made public at the Chaos Computer Club. When a suitably vulnerable Nokia phone receives an SMS which has been crafted in the right way it is struck deaf and becomes unable to receive SMS text messages without a factory reset: type #7370# to do this, but youll lose everything.
And because MMS is triggered by SMS thats killed too.
How does the bug work? Text messaging has lots of buried features.There are various types of text message such as those which update your internet settings or make a voicemail icon appear. Other types include paging systems, fax and email. You can also, if you know what you are doing, fake sending an email that by putting characters with those values in the right place in a message. For email the special type is "SMS and Internet Electronic Mail interworking". One of the things which differentiates an email from a text message is you have a from address as well as a body. To allow for this the standard uses a space between the from and the message.
To make all this a bit friendlier, Nokia phones using Series 60 version 2.6 or newer scan the bit before the space to look for what might be an email address something with an @ in it. Clearly this seemed to be a good idea to the right developers at the time, but its a minor feature and didnt justify significant testing. Unfortunately if the email address is longer than 32 characters, Series 60 versions 2.6, 2.8, 3.0 and 3.1 phones go into the kind of strop most families experience at Christmas and fail to communicate. Phones with version 2.6 or 3.0 dont shrug their shoulders or slam doors. In fact they dont give any indication that anything is wrong at all. A factory reset fixes this but will take all your personal data including the games high scores you spent so long on over Christmas. If you back your phone up after youve been attacked when you restore the data you restore the problem.
Its a bit harder to deafen a version 2.8 or 3.1 phone. These need to receive 11 maliciously crafted SMS text messages and then they say that there is not enough memory to receive further messages, and something should be deleted. These phones will seem to work if you soft reset them, but the next text message of over 160 characters will kill everything again.
continues...
That's a nasty bug. Fortunately I don't think there'll be widespread exploitation of it as there's no financial incentive and, believe it or not, text messages do cost money. It wouldn't surprise me if "prank" sites pop up that'll charge you £1.50 a pop to silence a friend's (hopefully vulnerable) mobile.
It'd take a pretty evil company to broadcast a significant volume of these.