Tools
In the 1st part, we’ve introduced the basic concepts of iOS reverse engineering. In this part,
we will introduce the toolkit of iOS reverse engineering.
Compared with App development, the main feature of iOS reverse engineering is it’s more
“mixed”. When you are writing Apps, most work can be done within Xcode, since it is the
product of Apple, it’s convenient to download, install and use. As for some other tools and
plugins, they are just some kind of icing on the cake, thus useful but non-essential.
But, in iOS reverse engineering, we have to face so many complicated tools. Let me make
an example, there are two dinner tables in front of you, on the first table there’s simply a pair of
chopsticks, it’s named Xcode; the other one is full of knives and forks, in which some of the big
shots are Theos, Reveal, IDA and etc...
Unlike Xcode, there is no tight connection among those reverse engineering tools; they are
separated from each other, so we need to integrate them manually. We cannot cover all reverse
engineering tools in this part, but I think you will have the ability to find and use proper tools
according to the situation you face when you finish reading this book. You can also share your
findings with us on http://bbs.iosre.com.
Because the tools to be introduced are quite disordered, we split this part to two chapters,
one is for OSX tools, the other is for iOS. The device used in this part is iPhone 5 with iOS 8.1.
II