Well this one is driving me crazy so better ask for some help before I fire the big guns and go commando mode with this. I’m trying to patch iOS apps so I can remove “spyware” and other stuff. Newest iOS versions require all code to be signed. This article by Saurik talks about 3 different ways to workaround this problem without a developer certificate (an idea that crossed my mind is to configure the kernel only to accept Apple’s certificates and my certificate, to avoid rogue stuff like worms [I have to see if code signing is effective against code injection for example])....

I just finished porting gdbinit to iOS. The basic stuff is working except the stepo command (one of my favourites!), the Objective-C selector and showing what will happen with conditional branches (I have to see how to implement this since ARM instructions can be conditional). I have tested it on my iPad with GDB available from Cydia (it seems you can use Apple’s version) and it works, so it should give no special problems with other iOS devices....

These days I’ve been messing around with DTrace and the mach side of OS X kernel. I still have to figure out how to make DTrace helpful in reversing protections and other stuff – I’m talking about efficiency in finding the right spots and gathering information. It’s a very powerful tool for system administration but has some shortcomings regarding reversing. Today I was a bit tired due to lack of proper sleep time so I started messing with the iPad....

I shouldn’t be posting this because the guy doesn’t deserve any traffic he might get by writing this. But it’s so funny that I cannot resist (yes, I’m weak). The blog post is called “I Can Crack Your App With Just A Shell (And How To Stop Me)” and it’s available here. I especially like his advice because it shows he doesn’t know nothing about protecting apps and I have the feeling on that second article he links being a complete ripoff from one or two articles around the web....

This will be a working in progress so this post might be updated a few times. As promised, a reader sent me the Mac App Store (MAS) validation guidelines (thank you again!) and I got curious about one detail, the exit(173). This guides states if application fails to validate the receipt because it’s not present, then it should exit with status 173. This status will be interpreted by the system and it will try to obtain a valid receipt – this is the reason why you see that message asking for Sign in when the receipt isn’t valid and you can see the email address of the guy who released that app to the wild....