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How Encrypted Binaries Work In Mac OS X

Posted by ryuzaki0 on 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."

6 of 365 comments (clear)

  1. Signed binaries = good, encrypted binaries = bad by elronxenu · · 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.

  2. Re:Signed binaries = good, encrypted binaries = ba by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    Wow, I guess the handful of bearded GNU freaks out there won't like this...

    Lucky for them Apple remains at some 2 percent worldwide marketshare over a year after getting dumped by IBM, so it is almost no practical relevance to the real world.

  3. Love mac - hate some of the choices by drDugan · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    I love my mac. I use it about 6+ hours a day and it intergratees into all my professional and personal life.

    I can't stand Dock. I've written and posted on this many times. I don't like how much time it takes to use, the resources it takes to animate it, and most annoying is that I can not remove it without trashing Finder. I keep it hidden, and stuffed up under the menu bar.

    I also can't stand spotlight. It is a resource hog and doesn't work well, plus it takes up critical real estate on the menu bar. "locate" in an xterm works much better. At least removing spotlight entirely was possible.

    If these (Dock and Spotlight) are the things Apple thinks are the gems to keep encrypted... wow. They are doing stuff I don't get.

    The real power of my Mac is the integrated windowing and graphics, OpenGL and the commerical support for DVD, burning, MS Word and Excel for business, and high end Adobe products that work *really* well. If not for those things, I'd be using a Linux laptop.

  4. Re:A nice benefit of this... by Andrew+Kismet · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    The smell of silicon designed for the software it runs?

  5. how about that? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    hey, it's another apple fag story. all the apple fags are clapping and dancing... and sucking dicks.

  6. Re:That poem is scary.. by QuantumG · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Who says I live in the US?

    American geniuses strike again!

    --
    How we know is more important than what we know.