RESEARCH LOG

Articles

Long-form offensive and defensive research into obfuscation, software protections, reverse engineering, and the tooling built along the way.

android apple challenge code-lifting cryptography fuzzing ios lief obfuscation reverse engineering write-up

Oct 31, 20264 min read

Detecting Frida Stalker

Frida's Stalker spills its scratch registers after the red zone. This blog post shows how this mechanism can be used to detect if a function is stalked.

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Jan 04, 202617 min read

A Glimpse Into DexProtector

This blog post provides a high-level overview of DexProtector's security features and their limitations

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Apr 28, 20258 min read

Fuzzing Windows ARM64 closed-source binary

This blog post introduces coverage-guided fuzzing with QBDI and libFuzzer targeting Windows ARM64.

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Sep 29, 202410 min read

Instrumenting an Apple Vision Pro Library with QBDI

This blog post demonstrates how to extract liblockdown.dylib from the visionOS dyld shared cache to be instrumented with QBDI on an Apple M1.

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Jan 04, 20232 min read

iCDump: A Modern Objective-C Class Dump

This blog post introduces iCDump, a new Objective-C class dump based on LLVM.

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Oct 31, 20228 min read

Open-Obfuscator: A free and open-source obfuscator for mobile applications

This blog post introduces open-obfuscator, a new open-source project to obfuscate mobile applications.

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Sep 13, 202212 min read

Part 2 – iOS Native Code Obfuscation and Syscall Hooking

This second blog post deals with native code obfuscation and RASP syscall interception

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Aug 29, 202225 min read

Part 1 – SingPass RASP Analysis

This first blog post introduces the RASP checks used in SingPass

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Aug 22, 20222 min read

A Journey in iOS App Obfuscation

This series of blog posts details how obfuscators can protect iOS applications from reverse engineering

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Nov 07, 202125 min read

PGSharp: Analysis of a Cheating App for PokemonGO

This blog post is about the internal mechanisms of PGSharp, a cheat engine for PokemonGO.

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Jul 18, 202114 min read

Gotta Catch 'Em All: Frida & jailbreak detection

This blog post analyzes the Frida and Jailbreak detection in PokemonGO for iOS.

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Sep 27, 20207 min read

r2-pay: whitebox (part 2)

This second blog post explains how to recover the whitebox's key from the obfuscated library libnative-lib.so

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Sep 20, 202014 min read

r2-pay: anti-debug, anti-root & anti-frida (part 1)

This first blog post describes the protections in the challenge r2-pay.

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Nov 26, 20195 min read

A Glimpse Into Tencent's Legu Packer

Analysis of Tencent Legu: a packer for Android applications.

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Jun 03, 201914 min read

Android Native Library Analysis with QBDI

This blog post deals with QBDI and how it can be used to reverse an Android JNI library

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Nov 20, 20181 min read

Android crackme challenge

Android crackme that uses system's internals

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Jun 25, 20181 min read

Android OAT formats

Internal structures of OAT format

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Jun 25, 20181 min read

Android VDEX formats

Internal structures of VDEX format

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May 03, 20187 min read

When SideChannelMarvels meets LIEF

On how we used LIEF to lift an Android x86_64 library to Linux to perform our usual white-box attacks on it.

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Mar 03, 20181 min read

How to use frida on a non-rooted device

This post explains how to use Frida gadget on a non-rooted device.

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Nov 02, 201713 min read

Have fun with LIEF and Executable Formats

This blog post introduces new features of LIEF as well as some uses cases.

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Apr 04, 20175 min read

Open-sourcing LIEF

We are open-sourcing LIEF, a library to parse and manipulate ELF, PE, and Mach-O binary formats. This blog post explains the purpose of this project and some parts of its architecture.

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