part of old message gets clubbed with part of new message and reflects on screen
On two different dates, a handset received two separate A2P
SMS messages, each consisting of two parts:
1. On 15th July, a two-part message was delivered and
correctly displayed as a single combined message.
2. On 18th July, a different two-part message was again delivered and correctly
displayed as expected.
However, in addition to these two correctly displayed messages, the handset
unexpectedly displayed a third message. This third message was a combination of
Part 1 of the 15th July message and Part 2 of the 18th July message, leading to
message content corruption and user confusion.
Preliminary Technical Analysis:
All four SMS parts contained User Data Headers (UDH) for
message concatenation.
It was observed that the Message Reference ID in the UDH was the same across
both messages (i.e., same reference number used for both the 15th and 18th July
messages).
The handset appears to have used the matching Message Reference ID to combine
SMS parts, without validating timestamps or delivery context.
This led to incorrect concatenation across two unrelated messages delivered on
different days.
iPhone 15, iOS 18