How do researchers reverse-engineer private frameworks?

Own the (private) libs today

I’m religious when it suits me.

More specifically, I worship gods.

Those 10x engineers who can do stuff with technology I can only dream of being capable of.

There are degrees, though. I have a physics one. I once worked with a guy who looked at me like I was a god for calculating the distance between two nodes on a 2D grid. I look at people who can code-golf shaders the same way.

Today, I’m praying to MxIris, who can look inside Apple’s private frameworks and extract all the internal Swift code like it’s nothing.

Let’s go behind the curtain to learn how this is even possible. There’s a few prerequisites we have to cover before the main event:

• Where can we find the binaries for the iOS SDK?

• What’s a binary made up of?

• How can we reverse engineer these binaries?

When this is done, you’ll have the power to inspect the internal Swift interface for any binary distributed by Apple. We’re even going to look inside the Foundation Models framework and learn what secrets are in store in future iOS versions.

This article wouldn’t be possible without standing on the shoulders of giants, specifically the MachOSwiftSection library by MxIris. I hope you find it as interesting as I do.

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