Apple's ‘China-friendly code’ leads iPhones to crash

An iPhone is seen on display at a kiosk at an Apple reseller store in Mumbai, India, January 12, 2017. Picture taken January 12, 2017. REUTERS/Shailesh Andrade - RC15EA9AD010

Typing 'Taiwan' or using the Taiwanese flag emoji by some Chinese users, led their iPhones to crash, according to a security researcher.

In his blog post, security researcher Patrick Wardle has claimed that a code added to “appease” the Chinese government was the reason behind the crashes.

Wardle, a former hacker for the US National Security Agency, also said that the bug spotted in iOS 11.3, is no more active as Apple had patched the bug in iOS 11.4.1.

The bug was capable of being triggered remotely and would crash any iOS application, processing remote messages on the recipient affected device.

“Though its impact was limited to a denial of service (null-pointer dereference), it made for an interesting case study of analysing iOS code. And if Apple hadn’t tried to appease the Chinese government in the first place, there would be no bug!,” the post adds.

According to Wardle, certain language and or region settings return a “null” code, which leads to the crash when 'Taiwan' was typed.

Wardle’s blog also provided a detailed account of how the crash was decoded and how the cause was discovered.