Happy new year, 2013 edition!

And 2012 (Gregorian calendar version) is almost over so it’s time to look back and ahead. This year was certainly a great one for myself. Had quite a few interesting projects, went to Asia and spoke at conferences for the first time, improved a lot my skills and fulfilled the main 2012 goal. It was certainly a very busy but fun year that set the pace for 2013. The projects’ queue for 2013 is already very interesting with lots of (fun) work ahead!...

December 28, 2012 · 1 min · 195 words · fG!

A quick review of Mac OS X and iOS Internals – To the Apple’s Core

The question that most people want to be answered is if this is the book to replace the venerable Mac OS X Internals by Amit Singh. In my opinion it’s complementary with some good updates and interesting tips. I wasn’t expecting to buy this book so soon due to some Twitter comments and to printing issues, with at least one chapter missing and replaced with another from a ASP.net book. A project I’m working at antecipated my waiting....

December 12, 2012 · 2 min · 349 words · fG!

Otool-ng – a set of small patches to Apple’s otool

It’s the lazy post season so I present you otool-ng. It’s a fork of Apple’s otool with small modifications for things that I use often or dislike in current otool. The segment command LC_MAIN was introduced to replace LC_UNIXTHREAD and one information that is lost is the entrypoint address. While ASLR kind of makes it less useful, I still debug a lot of programs and do other stuff, where ASLR is disabled....

November 21, 2012 · 2 min · 282 words · fG!

Kextstat_ASLR util or how to start hiding your kernel rootkit in Mountain Lion

Welcome back! This is a small post about a quick util that I created yesterday’s night while working on a side project. Mountain Lion introduced kernel ASLR and the kextstat util output doesn’t support (yet?) this feature. The addresses are not the real ones and this is quite annoying (kgmacros from kernel debugging kit also seem to fail at this!). What this util does is to read the kernel extensions information via the /dev/kmem device (hence this util is probably not useful for a large audience) and display it like kextstat does with the correct address for each kext (just the most important information, the linked against info might be added in the future)....

November 18, 2012 · 2 min · 414 words · fG!

5 years of reverse.put.as

Happy birthday to this blog! In 2007 I bought my first-ever Apple computer and started this blog. The amount of (public) reverse-engineering related information was scarce, cracking in particular. It was a whole new platform to me and a blog would be a good way to share my findings with others. I had experienced this with the PalmOS platform, where I created quite a few tutorials but never made them public....

October 10, 2012 · 2 min · 372 words · fG!