iOS bug: CoreText. How a single line of text can turn off your device.

A user on the popular Reddit platform posted about a phenomenon that occurred, when a text message was received with a specific set of characters. As seen on the original post here:

 Um... Can someone explain this phenomenon??

But is this a new type of bug, is everyone at risk?
If you remember iOS 6 had a similar bug. A specific sequence of Arabic characters would create a fatal error on any application using WebKit engine in iOS and Mac OS.

What is this new bug?

When you receive this specific characters in iMessage, your device tries to decode the (unicode) message. Sending your device into a loop. It's using all of the available memory until it becomes overwhelmed, and then it blocks itself (in the sense that you can't do anything about it while it happens) and turns it off/rebbots. You don't even have to open the  notification center. It can happen as well in the lock screen, the device would reboot. That also includes when the device is locked.

Thomas Finch a jailbreak developer provided a crash-log, which blamed CoreText as the reason for the crash. Shortly after developer Mokhlas Hussein what posted that he had created a fix. as well as developer Karen AKA angelXwind. Some users have reported that these 'fixes' DO NOT fix the issue if you're on iOS 6.

If you're one of those users on iOS 6. There's a fix that works, thanks to developer Fillipo Bigarella. This particular iOS 6 bug is not the same as the new one. However the patch works.

Open source fixes:

GlyphPatch fix for iOS 6

AntiEffevtive fix for iOS 7-8