Re: Class-Dump Protection??

FROM : Bob Ippolito
DATE : Thu Apr 28 20:02:21 2005

On Apr 27, 2005, at 8:07 PM, Julian wrote:

> I am wondering what can be done to prevent Class-Dump from dumping
> header files on MachO/ObjC binaries. So far Skype is the only Cocoa
> app I have seen that you cannot dump the headers, so I am curious as
> to what may be done to protect cocoa binaries.


It's probably just a bug in class-dump, it doesn't look like they used
GCC to compile it.  You could always just use PyObjC's objc.inject or
something similar to inject an extra thread into the process and then
ask the runtime what all the classes and selectors are, and ignore the
classes/selectors that come from places other than +[NSBundle
mainBundle].

In other words, you're barking up the wrong tree.  Objective-C's
runtime is too rich to make "secure", that's not really a bad thing
either.  You could write your application in obfuscated assembly and
people will still be able to hook gdb up to it, ktrace everything it
does to the filesystem, etc.

-bob