Funny how these faults keep happening over and over again in the same set of languages.

I am pretty sure that I can have injection attacks from unsanatized user inputs in any language.

Yes, but some languages (like my personal favorite Rust) make it practically impossible to happen with their equivalent of printf().

Funny how most car crashes are caused by humans driving.

It's completely their fault either way. They are responsible for the technology they use.

This nasty printf()-like way of formatting is a giant footgun though. Apple are not the first ones to fall into this trap.

We've all been trained to sanitize user input, but the WiFi SSID isn't a user input string, so why should I need to sanitize it? --some poor dev wondering where their Twitterverse sympathy is

Yeah it is, I can definitely type my SSID in any device that I have.

I'm typing a new SSID in right now...

In a better language than C, format string injection would be less likely to lead to arbitrary read/write/RCE.

I'll admit I looked around before writing this and saw that Python's str.format() can be pretty bad. So let's say a reasonably constrained formatting language in a good runtime -- the attacker is limited in what they can see or control, and the formatter can see how many arguments were actually passed so it doesn't tromp off into other memory.

You are making a false equivalence—not all languages are equally busted. Any sanely designed modern language does not allow this to happen. Accidentally parsing a string you didn’t mean to parse is a fault of C’s outdated API design, a design flaw that keeps tripping people up again and again.

> Any sanely designed modern language does not allow this to happen

Sorry, how does Rust protect you against injection again?

By requiring format strings to be literals.

https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&editio...

Why would Rust do anything weird when presented with the string "%p%s%s%s%s%n"?

Why would C?

Do you want the obvious explanation? Because the string was passed into the format string parameter of some sprintf-like, a common mistake in C usually caught by warnings but seemingly ignored or suppressed in this case.

edit: turns out from the analysis it was CFStringCreateWithFormatAndArguments, so yes, a sprintf-like used incorrectly

This is possible with any language. Not just C.

No, Rust for example explicitly disallows this.

https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&editio...

You miss my point entirely.

What is your point then?

You can do this in any language. Rust doesn't support it with PrintLn but it's still possible with Rust. Stop acting like C did anything wrong.