Reverse Engineering Resources

Debugging

These are very important guides for understanding the debugging process and how applications work.

Mach-O Binaries

Mac OS X and iOS use Mach-O file format for executable binaries and shared libraries. It supports multiple architectures in one binary file (Universal or fat binaries).

Analysis

Guides and introductory material to binary analysis.

Analyzing Binaries with Hopper (link)

System ABIs

Calling conventions define how functions and subroutines receive the parameters passed to them from the calling function.

Language Resources

Language specific knowledge is often required to understand what is going on behind the scenes.

Further Reading

Collection of blogs and reading resources that give deep insight into how many aspects of languages and system functionality.

NSBlog (link)

Reverse Engineering Mac OS X (link)

Landon's Blog (link)

OS X Internals (link)

Greg Parker's Blog (link)

Ridiculous Fish (link)

Snare's Blog (link)

To The Apple's Core (link)

The Objective-C Runtime: Understanding and Abusing (link)

Mach-O Binary Analyzers:

MachOViewer (Homepage)

Hex Editors:

Hex Fiend (Homepage)

0xED (Homepage)

Synalyze It! (Homepage)

Disassemblers:

Hopper (Homepage)

IDA (Homepage)

otool (man page)

otx (Homepage)

Decompilers:

Debuggers:

GDB (Not shipped on OS X anymore) (Homepage)

LLDB (Homepage - man page)

PonyDebugger (link)

Memory Editors:

Bit Slicer (Homepage - Source)

Useful Source Repositories: