Be it haters on your Twitter timeline trying to force you to log off, or your prankster Android-using friends messaging you the now-infamous Telugu character and crashing Messages, it has been quite a week to be an iPhone user. As with many previous similar issues, the problem is with Core Text, Apple's technology for drawing text and handling fonts. According to a Mozilla engineer Manish Goregaokar, the issue is caused by how ligatures are handled for some Indic languages. In this case, the source of the bug was the combination of Telegu characters in a certain format, which, while usually not very useful, can actually occur in some alphabets. It's possible that whenever Core Text on iOS (or macOS, or tvOS...) tries to handle this sequence characters, a miscommunication occurs, and the buffer for these glyphs is not allocated, which causes an error, and, eventually, a crash. While this is may not be as serious of an issue in terms of security, it is a denial of service attack, and...
