To quickly demonstrate this, let's open a binary in IDA Pro and try to debug it. The main IDA Pro application is not codesigned in this way. This means that the debugger itself must be codesigned in such a way that MacOS allows it to inspect other processes. Codesigning & Permissions It is important to note that a debugger running on OSX requires special permissions in order to function properly. Doing so will leave us vulnerable to old unfixed security flaws in the OS. Note however that our mac debugger has been perfectly functional since it was first developed for OSX 10.5 Leopard - so debugging on old unsupported OSX versions will probably work, but we cannot promise to fix any issues that arise. We can only guarantee mac debugging support on versions that Apple is actively maintaining. Thus, Hex-Rays has adopted the same policy.
Any older versions will usually stop receiving security updates. Supported OSX Versions It is Apple's unofficial policy to support only the 3 latest versions of OSX. Begin by downloading samples.zip which contains the sample applications used in this writeup. In this tutorial we will purposefully throw ourselves into the various pitfalls of debugging on a Mac, in the hopes that learning things the hard way will ultimately lead to a smoother experience overall. However, this task is riddled with gotchas and often times it demands precise workarounds that are not required for other platforms.
Ida pro mac mac osx#
1 Debugging Mac OSX Applications with IDA Pro Copyright 2020 Hex-Rays SA Overview IDA Pro fully supports debugging native OSX applications.