Edge Magazine is one of the oldest gaming magazines in the world. It is famous for the quality of its reviews, all of which were available online up until a few years ago, when their website was closed. The magazine continued its life in print and digital subscription format only. I really liked the content they produced, so I decided to purchase a one year subscription for the digital version.

Every time I buy some digital content online, the first thing I do is creating backup of it and making sure that I can use it without the official client application (if it exists). Most of the technical literature I buy comes in PDF format without DRM (InformIT, O’Reilly, No Starch Press). Amazon Kindle books come with DRM that is easy to remove, and the same thing goes for Audible books. For the Dark Horse Comics I wrote a little tool that converts their proprietary format into CBZ, which is a format that every comic book reader supports. Digital version of the Edge Magazine came with its own app, and there was no known way to backup the magazines. Application didn’t have any interactivity, so I assumed that it was just a viewer for PDF, EPUB or some other book format. If that was true, there had to be some way to extract the content from it. First step towards that goal was to reverse the application’s API.

Reversing the API

I’ve written about reversing private APIs in the post Reversing Runtastic API, so I won’t get into the details again. I’ll just give you a tour of the API, with the annotated requests and responses. API server is located at https://api.futr.efs.foliocloud.net. All requests are POST requests, with the URL encoded parameters. Responses are JSON formatted.

The exchange starts with client sending the request to the /createAnonymousUser/ endpoint. Request contains hard-coded appKey and secretKey parameters.

appKey: RymlyxWkRBKjDKsG3TpLAQ platform: iphone-retina secretKey: b9dd34da8c269e44879ea1be2a0f9f7c

Server responds with the random ID that the client must include in all following requests.

{ "data" : { "uid" : "05681280014840428595874b26b8ab4f9991495580" } }

Client sends its email address and password in the /login/ request.

api_params: {"identifier":"imateapot@mailinator.com","password":"imateapot"} uid: 05681280014840428595874b26b8ab4f9991495580

Server responds with the download ticket number. That’s unusual response for a login request.

{ "data" : { "download_ticket_no" : "00649540014842485615877d5f10fdbf6313623950" } }

This is the moment where things get interesting. When the login request is completed and the client receives a download ticket, login process is only halfway done. Next step is to call the /getDownloadUrl/ endpoint with the download ticket.

ticket: 00649540014842485615877d5f10fdbf6313623950 uid: 05681280014840428595874b26b8ab4f9991495580

Server will respond with status field initially set to -1. After that, client sends the getDownloadUrl repeatedly, until the server responds with status set to 1. I never established how it finally decides to let you in.

{ "data" : { "uid" : "05681280014840428595874b26b8ab4f9991495580" , "status" : 1 } }

Congratulations, you are logged in! Your status is now attached on the server to the ID you received in the initial request. Next step is to download list of all issues that you purchased. That is done via /getPurchasedProductList/ endpoint.

uid: 05681280014840428595874b26b8ab4f9991495580

Server responds with the list of all available issues, along with a bunch of metadata that is of no interest to us. Only one field is of relevance, and that is SKU. It contains the unique name of a magazine issue.

{ "data" : { "purchased_product_list" : [ { "sku" : "com.futurenet.edgemagazine.300" } ] } }

Finally, after we have the list of all purchased issues, we can ask for the download URL of a single issue by calling the /getEntitledProduct/ with the SKU parameter.

sku: com.futurenet.edgemagazine.300 uid: 05681280014840428595874b26b8ab4f9991495580

Server will respond with the product title and download URL.

{ "data" : { "sku" : "com.futurenet.edgemagazine.300" , "product_title" : "Christmas 2016" , "secure_download_url" : "http: \/\/ cdn.futr.efs.foliocloud.net \/ com.futurenet.edgemagazine.300.zip" } }

That’s it! When you have the download link, you can download the file without any authentication, so I didn’t include its real value in the example response.

After downloading the file for one of the issues that I had purchased, I discovered that it consists of bunch of PDF files named page-0.pdf, page-1.pdf, etc. That confirmed my initial theory. I was happy because all that was left was to somehow merge the files. Unfortunately, when I tried to open one of the PDFs, I was asked to provide the password. That came unexpected!

The good thing was that archive files were obviously statically hosted on the server (no user dependent data in the download URL), so there was only one password involved (in the more secure scheme, they could have generated the PDFs on the fly with the different password every time). All of that meant that the password was hard-coded in the application code in some way (either directly or derived from some other hard-coded values using some algorithm). My next step was to extract the application binary from my phone and somehow retrieve the password from it. But this turned out to be harder than expected.

iOS jailbreaking

Edge Magazine app was available only on iOS and Android, so decompiling .NET like I did in the case of Runtastic app was not an option. What was even worse, there was no standalone app on Android. Edge Magazine is downloaded via Google Play Newsstand, so I couldn’t just download the APK file and decompile it. That left native iOS application as my only choice. To extract the binary from the phone, I had to jailbreak it.

My iPhone had the latest available iOS version, for which the jailbreak was not available. Even if it was available, I would be reluctant to jailbreak my primary cell phone. I had an old iPad with the iOS 9.3.5 installed on it, but I soon discovered that all available jailbreak methods supported only iOS up to 9.3.3. Versions 9.3.4 and 9.3.5 were actually minor updates specifically designed to prevent known jailbreak methods. The only solution left was to buy some cheap old iPhone, preferably already jailbroken. While I was looking through online ads, I suddenly remembered that my girlfriend had an old iPod Touch that she stopped using some time ago, so it was available for me to play with. It was iPod Touch 4th Generation, with the ancient iOS 6.1.6. Remember this?

Edge Magazine app required at least iOS 7, but I decided to try to install it anyway. Somehow it was still being displayed in the app store. When I tried to download it, I was informed that it didn’t support my iOS version, but I was offered to install older version of the app instead. Good enough for me!

Now that I had the application installed, I could proceed with the jailbreak process. It was a very painful experience. There are two available tools for jailbreaking iOS 6.1.6, p0sixspwn and Redsn0w. I found a tutorial on iPhone Hacks webpage, but both tools failed spectacularly on my Mac, one by requiring some really old version of iTunes, and other by giving me some unknown errors. I tried them both on Windows 7 virtual machine, where I already had some old iTunes installed, but that also failed. This time one of the jailbreak tools simply crashed every time, and the other continued to give me errors. I finally managed to jailbreak my iPod Touch using some other laptop with Windows 10 installed and one of the previously mentioned tools.

Jailbroken device was only one of the many steps in the process of extracting the binary. Next thing I had to do was to enable remote access to the device by installing OpenSSH. If you want to access terminal directly on the device, you can install MobileTerminal too.

Extracting the binary

With all the prerequisites installed, I was back on track and started looking for the location of the application’s binary. I was not familiar with the iOS file system hierarchy, so I just did a grep search for edge. That gave me multiple results in the directory /private/etc/var/mobile/Applications/A043BAFC-8C87-40B1-BA0E-A8A673F377F0 . That looked like the root directory of the app. I could have just started exploring the directory from the terminal, but I preferred doing that in some GUI. Back when I was using Windows, I liked WinSCP, but on the Mac OS X I still haven’t tried any alternative. Google search quickly found Cyberduck, which looked well-designed, so I downloaded it. I connected to the device with the default root credentials (alpine is the default root password on every iPhone) and navigated to the folder I found.

I assumed the application was in the folio.app directory (it had the app extension, after all). The folder had a bunch of files and folders that looked like some kind of application resources. Among them was one file called folio, with the size of about 15MB. That was probably the binary!

But you can’t just copy the binary and disassemble it. All the applications on the iOS are encrypted, so I had to find a way to decrypt it. There are several available decryption tools and I randomly picked Clutch. Current version supported only iOS 8 or newer. Luckily, the app was hosted on GitHub and all of the previous releases were still there. I found the one that supported iOS 6.1.6 and copied it to the device. It was super simple to use, so I had the binary decrypted and copied to my machine in no time. I was ready for the disassembling.

Disassembling the binary

This was my first attempt at doing static analysis of a native application. I had experience in reversing managed applications, but that was a much easier task. On top of that, iOS runs on ARM architecture, and I was not familiar with ARM assembly at all.

IDA is without a doubt the best disassembler currently available, but it’s aimed at professionals, and that shows in its price. Much more affordable solutions for the hobbyist hackers are Hopper and Binary Ninja. I’ve heard a lot of good things about both, but the prevailing factor in my decision to choose Hopper was that it had the support for retrieving Objective-C information from the analyzed files, which was useful for a novice like me. I downloaded Hopper and opened the application binary in it. First screen that I encountered looked very intimidating.

Fortunately, Hopper’s user interface was relatively intuitive, even though it contained a lot of information. On the left side you can see the list of all functions and strings in the analyzed program. That was a good starting point for me. Middle part of the screen contained the most important part of the analyzed program: assembly code with the decompiled Objective-C code in the comments. On the right side there were a bunch of options, but the most interesting ones were Is Referenced By and Has Reference To, which looked very useful for navigation between functions.

My first step was to try to find which part of the code was doing the PDF decryption. I assumed that the function doing that would contain PDF in its name, so I did a search for PDF in the Proc. pane. There were hundreds of functions doing PDF operations. Instead of looking through that large list, I tried to narrow down the search by searching for password. That helped a lot, because the results could fit on the screen this time. Skimming through the list I quickly noticed the function CGPDFdocumentUnlockWithPassword. The name said everything.

I was not interested in the function itself, but rather in the parameters it received. One of them probably had to be the password. Is Referenced By section proved helpful by showing that the function was called in two places, located at addresses 0x3dc3b6 and 0x3dc428. I navigated to the first one. That call to CGPDFdocumentUnlockWithPassword was located inside one huge function. I started going through it line by line. First thing I noticed was that the function was using a bunch of weird looking strings in blocks of instructions, looking like this:

003dc01e movw r6, #0x2ddc ; @"\\\"F0rdbCCI", :lower16:(0x5cee08 - 0x3dc02c) 003dc024 movt r6, #0x1f ; @"\\\"F0rdbCCI", :upper16:(0x5cee08 - 0x3dc02c) 003dc0ac movw r6, #0x2d60 ; @"vo*t3hGw", :lower16:(0x5cee18 - 0x3dc0b8) 003dc0b0 movt r6, #0x1f ; @"vo*t3hGw", :upper16:(0x5cee18 - 0x3dc0b8) 003dc116 movw r0, #0x2d04 ; @"KUC%3p1c", :lower16:(0x5cee28 - 0x3dc124) 003dc11a movt r0, #0x1f ; @"KUC%3p1c", :upper16:(0x5cee28 - 0x3dc124) 003dc14e movw r0, #0x2cdc ; @"SjPJ&h0nkY!\\\"", :lower16:(0x5cee38 - 0x3dc15c) 003dc152 movt r0, #0x1f ; @"SjPJ&h0nkY!\\\"", :upper16:(0x5cee38 - 0x3dc15c)

These strings looked like they were being combined into a password. First one started with the escaped quote, and the last one ended with the exclamation mark and escaped quote. I tried concatenating them in various ways in attempt to form a valid password for the PDF files, but had no luck. At this point I knew that finding the password was just a matter of time. I could have invested some time in learning the basics of ARM v7 assembly, but I wanted to try a few more things before that, because I felt that I was very close to a solution.

I opened the Strings pane and navigated to the place where the four strings of interest were located, hoping that I would see something interesting in their vicinity.

004dcff9 db "\"F0rdbCCI", 0 ; DATA XREF=cfstring__F0rdbCCI 004dd003 db "vo*t3hGw", 0 ; DATA XREF=cfstring_vo_t3hGw 004dd00c db "KUC%3p1c", 0 ; DATA XREF=cfstring_KUC_3p1c 004dd015 db "SjPJ&h0nkY!\"", 0 ; DATA XREF=cfstring_SjPJ_h0nkY__ 004dd022 db "SavedPasswords", 0 ; DATA XREF=cfstring_SavedPasswords

There was a string SavedPasswords right next to them. Could it be that the password is being saved somewhere? I connected via SSH to the device again, this time searching for files containing the string SavedPassword. I had one hit! The file was called com.futurenet.edgemagazine.plist . If looked promising, because plist is the default configuration file format in Apple software system. I copied it to my Mac using Cyberduck, because Mac OS has a nice viewer for plist files. Looking through the contents of the file I found this:

The password was the concatenation of the strings that I found before, with some of the characters removed: “F0rd bCCIvo *t3h GwKUC %3p1c SjPJ &h0nkY!” I was overjoyed! It goes without saying that the password worked on downloaded PDFs.

Unlocking and combining the individual PDF pages

My job was still only partially done. What I had at the moment were individual PDF pages and the password that could decrypt them, but I still had to write the application that would produce single PDF that combined the decrypted pages. I started looking for PDF libraries written in Go. After some time, I stumbled upon UniDoc. Among the features listed on the features page there were Merge PDF and Unlock PDF. That was exactly what I needed! What was even better is that the authors of the library had separate GitHub repository with examples that included both merging and unlocking PDFs. With that knowledge, it was just a matter of hours before I had fully functional application for downloading Edge Magazine issues. You can download it here.