Reverse Engineering iOS Apps

iOS reverse engineering is a mixed bag. On one hand, apps programmed in Objective-C and Swift can be disassembled nicely. In Objective-C, object methods are called via dynamic function pointers called "selectors", which are resolved by name during runtime. The advantage of runtime name resolution is that these names need to stay intact in the final binary, making the disassembly more readable. Unfortunately, this also means that no direct cross-references between methods are available in the disassembler and constructing a flow graph is challenging.

References¶

[#miller] - Charlie Miller, Dino Dai Zovi. The iOS Hacker's Handbook. Wiley, 2012 - https://www.wiley.com/en-us/iOS+Hacker%27s+Handbook-p-9781118204122
[#levin] Jonathan Levin. Mac OS X and iOS Internals: To the Apple's Core. Wiley, 2013 - http://newosxbook.com/MOXiI.pdf