Windows Phones Crash on Receipt of Crafted SMS

A flaw discovered by Khaled Salameh and tested by Winrumors, demonstrated that users could be affected no matter which OS or version they used since it affected phones such as HTC’s TITAN (running on Windows Phone version 7.5) and Samsung’s Focus Flash as well (running on Mango RTM build 7720).

The windows phone gives hackers way to disrupt its messaging client. This means a text containing a certain string of characters could cause your windows phone to reboot, and come back with a disabled messaging client that will not work till you perform a complete reset. No work-around has been discovered for the messaging hub disruption so far.

The SMS attack could also be triggered by a Facebook chat message update if the user had the sender pinned as a tile on the device. In this case, the live tile would automatically update, thus causing the device to hang and reboot.

The work-around, for this issue requires the user to make use of the time-frame when the device boots-up, during which he/she would have to remove the pinned tile from the home screen after getting past the lock screen.

Apple’s iPhone and devices using Google’s Android have also suffered functionality damages as a result of SMS bugs in the past.