It’s taken a while for security researchers to find flaws in the popular protocol used to send text messages between mobile phones. Yet, at the Black Hat Security Conference, four researchers revealed weaknesses in the protocol, including vulnerabilities in three major platforms: Apple’s iPhone, Microsoft’s Windows Mobile, and Google’s Android.

For security consultant Charlie Miller and graduate student Collin Mulliner, the hard part was not finding the vulnerabilities in the short message service (SMS) but in creating a way to send tens of thousands of 140-character messages directly to the phone, bypassing the provider’s network.

The researchers used a technique known as “fuzzing,” where thousands to millions of permutations of a specific format are used to test the robustness of a computer program. Sending those messages over the provider’s network could allow the company to shut down the experiment – not to mention, result in an astronomical phone bill.

“People don’t fuzz SMS … because it would probably crash their (the provider’s) infrastructure and get us kicked off their service,” Miller says.

Instead, the two researchers found a way to directly inject packets into the smart phones. In the case of Apple’s iPhone, the researchers had to create a hacked, or “jailbroken,” version that does not have all the security of the out-of-the-box device. Yet, when they found interesting packets, they confirmed the results on the standard iPhones.

In this case, the two researchers used the Sulley fuzzing framework to create technically correct SMS packets that abused the protocol in some way.

Hacking phones via SMS is not easy, Miller says. The limitations of the protocol, especially the 140-character message length, means that transferring an exploit to the phone can take a lot of messages. In the case of the iPhone hack, the researchers had to send hundreds of messages, he says.

“It probably took 500 to set up everything just right so I could get it where I could take control,” Miller says.

Because the process that handles SMS messages runs as root on the iPhone, once that process is compromised, an attacker would have full control of the device. Apple fixed the SMS flaw a week ago.

Two other researchers, Zane Lackey of iSec Partners and independent consultant Luis Miras, who also presented research into SMS vulnerabilities at the Black Hat Security Conference, took a similar approach, Miller said.