Security vulnerabilities in iOS 16

Security vulnerabilities in iOS 16

A Chinese developer has published a tool that exploits a vulnerability in the iOS operating system to allow users to change the font on their iPhone smartphones.

The tool does not require any kind of jailbreak, but it requires that the phone be running version 16.1.2 and earlier of the iOS system, because it relies on a vulnerability in the system kernel that is being tracked under the identifier CVE-2022-46689, and fixed in iOS 16.2.

If the user has updated their iPhone to iOS 16.2, which is recommended for security reasons, they will not be able to change the font. Then the font change will be canceled after the device restart, and applications that use the default San Francisco font will not change.

The tool offers a number of pre-installed fonts, such as the famous (Comic Sans MS) font, the (Segoe UI) font, which is the default font for Microsoft products, and the (Choco Cooky) font of Samsung. Custom fonts can be installed as long as they are compatible with iOS.

It is noteworthy that Apple used to support mass customization of its user interfaces in the classic Mac OS days, when everything from the system font to window borders could be customized using the Apperance Manager tool.

Then these settings disappeared in the initial versions of the Mac OS X operating system (Mac OS X), and changing the look and feel of any of Apple's operating systems has become more difficult in recent years as Apple has taken more steps to protect system files from modification and tampering.