The original method to hijack sysent table was described by Landon Fuller and then Braden Thomas updated it to Snow Leopard due to new location and lack of nsysent symbol. Charlie Miller and Dino Dai Zovi at The Mac Hacker’s Handbook, have some code to try to automate this search for sysent. I never tried it before and today I decided to hack around it. It suffers from the problem of no nsysent symbol (is there a way to fix it? I remember I tried when Snow Leopard was out but couldn’t work around it), so we need to hardcore its address. Fortunately this address has been in a rather stable range, so we can use one value and work on that range. The same applies to the offset from nsysent symbol to sysent table.

The basic code (slightly modified from the original since it was for Leopard, typos included) is like this:

#define is_small(x)		(*(x)>=0 && *(x)<100)
#define is_addy(x)		(*(x)>10000)
#define is_optional_addy(x)	(*(x)==0 || *(x)>10000)
#define is_stuct_sysent(x)	( is_small(x) && is_addy((x)+1) && is_optional_addy((x)+2) && is_optional_addy((x)+3) && is_small((x)+4) && is_small((x)+5) )
#define is_sysent(x)		(is_stuct_sysent((x)) && is_stuct_sysent((x+6)) && is_stuct_sysent((x+12)) && is_stuct_sysent((x+18)) && is_stuct_sysent((x+24)) )

static struct sysent *find_sysent ()
{
(...)
	unsigned int *looker = (unsigned int *) ( 0x00831790 - 0x3000 );

	while(!is_sysent(looker))
	{
		looker++;
	}
	printf("[onyx-the-black-cat] Found sysent table at %x\n", looker);
(...)

You can adapt the find_sysent to include this change and use the found value to double check if it’s really sysent and hijack it. You might need to adjust the value that is substracted, but it successfully identified sysent for 10.6.3 and 10.6.5. There is room for improvement in those macros, since they generate some false positives in other ranges. One idea is to add the remaining fields of sysent structure, which should reduce the possible amount of false positives.

That’s it for now. I’ve been working on improving some tools but they will not be released. The fuss about Protools at MSJ remembered me that the majority of people just want to pirate software and free stuff, knowledge is a secondary or not even important. The economic crisis has shown us the results of greed, and greed is something that I really hate! These days I also had a user asking for help but he was annoyed by my lack of cooperation – I wasn’t pointing him to basic stuff. Well, that basic stuff is available at my blog and over the web. I really hate people who don’t make an effort to learn, research and study. Might be a personal flaw but it’s something that I strongly believe: No effort, No gain! He was also pissed off by losing 3 days around a simple crackme without advancing. Who said cracking is easy and rewarding all the time?

To finish, just a little publicity to a magnificient App that I started using and love: Alfred. Buy it if you really use the advanced features (of course you can crack it as personal curiosity but pay for it if you really use those features, the rest of the app is free and it rocks!).

Have fun,
fG!

P.S.: The problem with nsysent seems to be related to this.