App Store Bug Corrupts Binaries; Angry Birds Crash

First time accepted submitter bargainsale writes "Many recent updates from Apple's App store are crashing immediately, including Instapaper. Instapaper's creator, Marco Arment, thinks this is due to corrupt binaries being distributed. As Angry Birds Space is among those affected, there is some hope that Apple may acknowledge the problem and fix it ..."

Comments

Less likely than dropping the patent issues

[Anonymous Coward]

As Angry Birds Space is among those affected, there is some hope that Apple may acknowledge the problem and fix it ...

Pfft. Right. Apple? Admit to a problem? When the purity and divinity of their precious walled garden model is, in fact, one of the major points they and their acolytes^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hfanboys push when claiming edges over Android? Yeah, that'll happen. And then they'll drop all the patent issues they spent so long "innovating", right?

Re:Sent from my mortuary temple:

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Are you seriously suggesting that Steve would approve of there being ways other than the One True Way to install things on an iPhone?

That sounds dangerously close to jailbreaker talk...

Flamebait submission much?

[93 Escort Wagon]

Seriously, updated/fixed Instagram downloads were available within a few hours. Having read various issue reports - this only affects certain apps and apparently only for certain users in certain regions - just how fast is the submitter expecting an official response? How fast would the submitter offer up an official statement if his software exhibited a bug under similar circumstances?

Apple?

[MAXOMENOS]

As Angry Birds Space is among those affected, there is some hope that Apple may acknowledge the problem and fix it

Fix it, maybe. Acknowledge it? Not bloody likely.

Re:Another Apple first

[marcello_dl]

It doesn't follow. The binary might be corrupted before being hashed.

You don't need technical reasons to bash Apple, even if their product were technically impeccable, you have too little control over them.

Re:This.

[thrillseeker]

They'll get right on this engineering effort as soon as they finish their litigation efforts.

They are supposed to crash.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

What is the issue here? Aren't angry birds supposed to crash? You are supposed to pull the catapult and release it and the angry birds crash into structures built by pigs and destroy them. Don't get upset, there is a never ending supply of angry birds. So what is the problem here?

Re:Another Apple first

[h4rr4r]

So then they did not test it after building it?

Dev sends app and hash to apple. Apple distributes and has end devices check hash at install time, if hash no match download again.

Exactly where does this problem slip in without anyone noticing?

Re:Another Apple first

[tlhIngan]

Huh, then you have to wonder whether the signature process failed or the hash process failed...if the signature process failed and the App Store not only passed incorrectly signed apps onto devices but allowed them to be installed, that's a security vulnerability.

I'd suspect something a bit more innoculous.- like data center storage corruption.

iOS apps are encrypted - or rather, parts of them are. The executable has portions of its code and data segments encrypted, and the list of encrypted parts and the decryption key are then encrypted with the user's Apple ID key. That key is transferred to the device so that iOS can decrypt the binary encryptoin key and the list of encrypted segments (there aren't any headers).

The reason apps can crash would include either the encryption table is blank and iOS decrypts the binary incorrectly (probable cause - disk full) thus causing corrupt code and data to be executed, or perhaps everything IS encrypted properly, but the binary is corrupt.

The former would be erratic - some people would find it works correctly, others not, and it wouldn't matter if updates happened because it would occur on any download. The latter would mean the storage system has failed and thus during the DRM process, it's DRM'ing corrupt binaries.

Since it's specific binaries that do this, perhaps some of Apple's massive storage servers have failed catastrophically. (they use iSilon/EMC storage servers at their NC datacenter I believe). And also why re-uploaded versions of same work - they were put on more stable storage.

FYI - the way pirated apps work is they run the app, then use GDB to halt execution. Then they use GDB to dump the running image back out to get the decrypted version which then replaces the encrypted chunks with the decrypted versions.

I would also guess that Apple's "fixing it" because I kept running into issues downloading ("This application is not currently available").