When you think about how hackers could break into your smartphone, you probably imagine it would start with clicking a malicious link in a text, downloading a fraudulent app, or some other way you accidentally let them in. It turns out that's not necessarily so—not even on the iPhone, where simply receiving an iMessage could be enough to get yourself hacked.

At the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday, Google Project Zero researcher Natalie Silvanovich is presenting multiple so-called “interaction-less” bugs in Apple’s iOS iMessage client that could be exploited to gain control of a user’s device. And while Apple has already patched six of them, a few have yet to be patched.

“These can be turned into the sort of bugs that will execute code and be able to eventually be used for weaponized things like accessing your data,” Silvanovich says. “So the worst-case scenario is that these bugs are used to harm users.”

Silvanovich, who worked on the research with fellow Project Zero member Samuel Groß, got interested in interaction-less bugs because of a recent, dramatic WhatsApp vulnerability that allowed nation-state spies to compromise a phone just by calling it—even if the recipient didn’t answer the call.

But when she looked for similar issues in SMS, MMS, and visual voicemail, she came up empty. Silvanovich had assumed that iMessage would be a more scrutinized and locked-down target, but when she started reverse engineering and looking for flaws, she quickly found multiple exploitable bugs.

This may be because iMessage is such a complex platform that offers an array of communication options and features. It encompasses Animojis, rendering files like photos and videos, and integration with other apps—everything from Apple Pay and iTunes to Fandango and Airbnb. All of these extensions and interconnections increase the likelihood of mistakes and weaknesses.

One of the most interesting interaction-less bugs Silvanovich found was a fundamental logic issue that could have allowed a hacker to easily extract data from a user’s messages. An attacker could send a specially crafted text message to a target, and the iMessage server would send specific user data back, like the content of their SMS messages or images. The victim wouldn't even have to open their iMessage app for the attack to work. iOS has protections in place that would usually block an attack like this, but because it takes advantage of the system's underlying logic, iOS’ defenses interpret it as legitimate and intended.

Other bugs Silvanovich found could lead to malicious code being placed on a victim's device, again from just an incoming text.

Interaction-less iOS bugs are highly coveted by exploit vendors and nation-state hackers, because they make it so easy to compromise a target's device without requiring any buy-in from the victim. The six vulnerabilities Silvanovich found—with more yet to be announced—would potentially be worth millions or even tens of millions of dollars on the exploit market.