Reverse Engineering

Newsflash: How to fuck up 40 million USD – The New York Times paywall and its iPad app

This will be a story in development, which is kinda of funny taking in account the target in question. I might be wrong on all this but my instinct is hinting me that I’m not. After the Contract Killer post I got very much interested in verifying these kind of implementations in other apps. This morning I had a flash into my mind about checking what happened with the NY Times app....

Hacking a freemium iOS app: Contract Killer … or unlimited play without spending a dime (or any other currency)

Let me start this post with a little rant. The iPad is a great product but it’s full of “spyware” and that sucks big time. One might argue that it’s not spyware, it’s just sending bits of information. Well, for me it’s damn spyware because I’m not authorizing the apps to send any information, much less unique pieces of information that can identify you forever. I can’t even conceive why the enterprise world will adopt the iPad with these kind of problems....

Small update to gdbinit and to the website

I decided to mess around with this blog template style sheets and use a better font and change some minor things. I added three new pages at the navigation bar – one with all available gdbinit files in this site, another for my GDB patches and a tag cloud (still have to tag old posts). I will also add a page with all source code published here. This small gdbinit update implements some fixes and a new command rint3 (check the file header for the changelog)....

Update to GDB patches – fix for a "new" bug

I was messing around with SoftwarePassport and Amit Singh’s tiny executable to find out why GDB doesn’t breakpoint in those two executables. I thought it was due to incomplete headers, but GDB can’t also breakpoint into nicertiny, which has the segment/section added (otool/otx problems can be fixed by manually adding the missing section – there is enough padding space in the header to do that so SoftwarePassport developers might want to fix that)....

There’s a new protection in town, Software Passport, from the developers of Armadillo :-)

A reader sent me the link for a new software protection package called Software Passport (here). This is from The Silicons Realms, the makers of Armadillo for Windows. Since I’m as curious as a cat, I started giving a quick look on it, to see if it has any interesting things related to anti-debugging and anti-disassembly. The good news is that there are some new tricks that I haven’t seen before, for example, GDB can’t trace the initial loader....