Researcher Carl Schou discovered a bug in the iPhone last month that disrupts wireless connectivity when connected to an access point with a specific name. Worse, Wi-Fi won’t work even after a device reboot or if the hotspot is renamed.
The problem was encountered while connecting to an access point named “% p% s% s% s% s% n”. When trying to connect to this network, Wi-Fi on the device simply turned off, and when the expert tried to turn it on again, nothing happened either after restarting the device or after changing the SSID. As a result, it turned out that the only way to get rid of this bug is to completely reset the network settings on the device.
Apparently, the root of this problem lies in an error related to the parsing of the input data. When a string with “%” characters is present in access point names, iOS may misinterpret letters following “%” as format specifiers . Shu admitted that he deliberately names all of his access points in such a way as “to eat * badly designed devices.”
Shu has now reported on Twitter that he has found another type of SSID that causes the same problems as described above. It turned out that Wi-Fi on iPhone (and other iOS devices) also fails when connected to a network named “% secretclub% power”. Once connected to such a network, the device will no longer be able to use Wi-Fi and any related functions.
Shu warns that neither a factory reset nor a forced reboot of the device helped him personally. The researcher has already reported the problem to Apple, but has yet to receive any response from the company.