Retrieving Strings

Strings are always a good starting point while analyzing a binary, as they provide context to the associated code. For instance, an error log string such as "Cryptogram generation failed" gives us a hint that the adjoining code might be responsible for the generation of a cryptogram.

In order to extract strings from an iOS binary, you can use GUI tools such as Ghidra or iaito or rely on CLI-based tools such as the strings Unix utility (strings <path_to_binary>) or radare2's rabin2 (rabin2 -zz <path_to_binary>). When using the CLI-based ones you can take advantage of other tools such as grep (e.g. in conjunction with regular expressions) to further filter and analyze the results.

Resources¶

iaito