Re: Criminals among us?
Re: Criminals among us?
- Subject: Re: Criminals among us?
- From: David Remahl <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 22 Jan 2003 16:10:28 +0100
On Wednesday, January 22, 2003, at 03:30 PM, Thilo Ettelt wrote:
>
Whatever. Is it possible to access my application's code from a
>
different Cocoa application by loaded the code? And how do you make a
>
class dump?
Thilo,
I'm not quite sure I can follow your train of thought here...This mail
is very terse, and I was unable to find anything to connect it to any
recent discussion.
I will try to answer your questions, though.
Applications are Bundles. They contain resources and executables. They
are not much different from plugins and frameworks. It is possible that
one can manage to load a separate application into the executable space
of an application, and call methods in it - but I believe it would be
extremely difficult. With bundles that are designed to be loaded
(plugins and frameworks) the story is different, of course.
However, while loading a bundle will give the loading application
access to the functionality provided by the loaded classes, it will not
give access to the high-level code for them. The code is compiled into
machine instructions and remain irreversibly so before it leaves the
developer's computer.
Except for disassembling the application and reverse engineering it at
that low level, it is also possible to "exploit" the information that
the Objective C runtime uses. Executable applications using the ObjC
runtime contain information on the available classes and methods, in a
fairly high-level format. An application such as class-dump
<
http://people.omnigroup.com/nygard/Projects/>, extracts that
information from the executable and outputs it in a human-readable form
(actually, as class interface definitions suitable for inclusion in
header files). Still, it only gives the class interface definition.
By combining this method of getting access to the interfaces, with the
bundle loading to get access to the compiled implementation, it is
possible to use code stored in plugins and frameworks. I'm unclear on
wether it could also be used to exploit code in other applications -
even though class-dump also can work on application executables.
>
- Thilo
>
>
PS: I'm angry.
Well, you have no reason, what so ever, to be upset. Also, would you
please explain the subject line of this email?? Who are you accusing,
and what are you accusing him/her of?
/ Regards, David
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