How Encrypted Binaries Work In Mac OS X

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Monday October 30, 2006 @11:13AM from the under-the-hood dept.

An anonymous reader writes "By now we know that OS X uses encrypted binaries for some critical apps like Dock, Finder and LoginWindow. Amit Singh explains the implementation of this protection scheme which makes use of the AES crypto algorithm and a special memory pager in Mach. The so called Do Not Steal Mac OS X (DSMOS) kernel extension helps along the way by decrypting things for the special pager when apps get executed. A funny thing is that if you print the pointer at address 0xFFFF1600 in your own app you get as output Apple's karma poem for crackers! According to the article there are 8 protected binaries in OSX including Rosetta and Spotlight meta data demon. Interestingly Apple's window server is NOT one of those."

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Signed binaries = good, encrypted binaries = bad by elronxenu · 2006-10-30 11:23 · Score: 0, Flamebait

Encrypted binaries subvert GNU's Freedom #1 "freedom to study the source code and modify it to do as you wish". Even though the source is not available, binaries can be reverse-engineered (and this is explicitly permitted by copyright law, for interoperability purposes) ... but not if it's been encrypted.
Re:A nice benefit of this... by Andrew+Kismet · 2006-10-30 12:17 · Score: 0, Flamebait

The smell of silicon designed for the software it runs?
Re:That poem is scary.. by QuantumG · 2006-10-30 14:45 · Score: 0, Flamebait

Who says I live in the US?

American geniuses strike again!

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How we know is more important than what we know.