Reverse engineer anything with agents, from app behavior down to native binaries | Hacker News Reader

Reverse engineer anything with agents, from app behavior down to native binaries

github.com

101 pointstaytus39 comments

Such a click-baity name. Open challenge to anyone to use this framework and reverse engineer the internal APIs iPhone uses to talk to Siri or shortcuts or app Intents.

just curious, why is that hard to do?

focus and expertise. apple lacks both when it comes to AI. maybe it is strategic, maybe it is stupid hubris - we will soon figure out.

in any case, they're bound to get disrupted

Meanwhile they haven’t had iOS jailbroken since iOS 17 four years ago

Pegasus begs to differ!

Link to download?

PSA: Do not eat the yellow snow. There are not 15 hot singles in your area looking to meet up. Do not click mystery "Link to download" blobs from strangers.

strictly available only to sovereign states, national governments, and authorized law enforcement or intelligence agencies

iOS is routinely hacked into to spy on activists all over the world, and the hardware is backdoored (Operation Triangulation).

Source?

For what in particular? You can read about Pegasus [0], although that page doesn't even remotely deal full justice to the extent of how widely it's deployed (e.g. basically all Russian opposition was/is tapped with it and somehow it doesn't even mention this). LEA of a lot of countries have some way to break into locked iPhones, such as Cellebrite's tools [1] or GrayKey [2]. I mean, even the popular US body cam channels on YouTube casually mention unlocking perpetrator's iPhone using the "forensics methods available to the police" like it's no big deal.

Operation Triangulation [3-8] had two separate attack chains, one of which is redundant, implying it's here just because it's a part of a bigger modular suite and the attacker can waste decades old 0-days just like that, having a ton more in reserve, and also something that looks awfully like an intentional hardware backdoor. What's fascinating about this attack is that it should have obliterated any vendor's reputation as being highly secure or government-resistant, yet we still have people thinking iOS is secure, and Apple had worldwide media coverup and multiple credible hardware experts unrelated to either Apple or ARM saying the backdoor is not intentional but more like a "genuinely forgotten debugging feature" (guess how a good backdoor should look like...), see the HN discussion [9] and . Despite Steve Jobs passing away long ago, the reality distortion field around Apple still seems as strong as ever.

Obviously this is just a tip of the iceberg, and how many of these are in the wild or how many backdoors the hardware still has is unknown. I'm sure that with better AI capabilities closed source vendors have many big surprises coming in 2027-2028. The availability of public jailbreaks is unrelated matter, they're necessary to support third-party stores against Apple's will but that's clearly not feasible. Samsung phones didn't have custom ROMs for the same reason, for example.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_(spyware)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellebrite_UFED

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grayshift

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Triangulation , however I recommend reading OG writeups below because they reveal more pecularities that make this attack special.

[4] https://securelist.com/operation-triangulation/109842/

[5] https://securelist.com/operation-triangulation-catching-wild...

[6] https://securelist.com/triangulation-validators-modules/1108...

[7] https://securelist.com/triangledb-triangulation-implant/1100...

[8] https://securelist.com/operation-triangulation-the-last-hard...

[9] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38783112

Eyy! Nice idea. I need to try to see how things work.

I dont know why Apple doesnt improve Siri. They have every resources on earth.

Steve had the vision …

FYI, Siri was effectively "fixed" as of OS 27. This is why Apple is finally able to launch their Siri-centric home products tomorrow. https://pogueman.substack.com/p/125-tests-of-the-new-ai-siri

Nah sadly not. It's very slow, fails to respond half the time (just decides to disappear, ot "we ran into a problem"), it's nowhere near the full duplex voice of GPT Live - Siri is still some dumb text model behind a TTS model, and does not work like modern agents which can take chains of actions for me. It's pathetic.

It might reverse engineer them but that’s different from letting you use them

It will be interesting to see if anyone reverse engineers IDA Pro!

I'll bet it is against their TOS...

There's no obscurity anymore. Best you can do is keep as much as possible server side. Curious if anyone has experimented with LLM's RE'ing obfuscated code. I suspect they handle it just fine.

> Curious if anyone has experimented with LLM's RE'ing obfuscated code.

Sort of, albeit I haven't checked with SotA obfuscation, I've seen GPT 6.1 Sol find a URL hidden under a xorpad + 2 layers of encryption, and I've seen Astra RE an AES whitebox.

More importantly, remember these game decomps (e.g. Pokémon)? Well, with minimal guidance and IDA MCP these new models are able to do this _and_ properly name all function/params/locals in a single day.

RE was arguably the first* task category to become completely solvable by LLMs on cybersecurity CTFs. This is exactly about obfuscated code, LLMs seem to have no problems with it now. The only probabilistic defense is to include tons of red herring so agent goes the wrong path and ends up in some tarpit like bruteforcing unrelated un-bruteforceable hashes.

* Cryptography category also went down fast but I think LLMs solved RE a bit faster. RE and crypto have in common that the task is completely local, but in classic RE tasks it is also usually ~obvious what you are supposed to do, you just need to do it - which agents do really well.

today i read that for new game studios, the possibility of going stream only (like amazon luna) instead of downloadable is a probable future if they want to prevent piracy.

isn't this what google stadia was supposed to do and failed?

Obscurity is kept by banning decompilation in EULAs. Can’t block black box reimplementation though (At least in EU), and that’s often good enough.

Obfuscation is no obstacle at all in my experience.

Are decompilation bans found to be widely enforceable or legal in most jurisdictions?

Genuine question; I do not know much about this area.

My layman understanding (as someone who isn't a lawyer but has been tasked with some reimplementations), is that it at least is governed by different sections of law. For me it's the European Software Directive where Article 5 is pretty generous and governs basically "observing" software for reverse engineering. Article 6 is less generous and is about decompilation. There you basically can only to it to ensure interoperability.

So depending on what the goal is (making an interoperable piece of software, or making a clone?), you might want to stay under Article 5, and steer clear of Article 6.

https://vidstromlabs.com/blog/the-legal-boundaries-of-revers...

I ported a linux game binary from a Cortex-A7 to a Allwinner A133P (32bit to 64bit) in about two hours using Claude over the weekend. (I didn't have the source). SDL and the games encryption were the only things that made it more than a 15 minute activity.

If it has a binary value you can aim the Ai at, (aka does it work or not), the models are able to figure it out.

For laughs I'm probably going to have a Qwen model on my Mac min with the Pi harness do the same task in a week or two.

Hmm, prolly no reason this wouldn't work on older educational dos/windows games and porting them to linux. Damn, another weekend is going to be lost isn't it.

Brilliant. Time to take on the outrageous MSI windows software / broken Linux support.

this is going to lead to a trend of all software running on vendor computers instead of users its the only viable way

How would that protect anything? "Hey claude, clone that shit"

It seems both very lossy and very expensive (even in a future where agents are cheaper to run) to have an AI clone, say, a 3D video game. It also seems borderline impossible to have an AI usefully clone a service for which the served data is the valuable part, like TikTok or Facebook.

Facebook, TikTok, etc sell data, attention, infrastructure and established userbases, the software is just a medium.

Brother, and I say this with all the respect in the world. You are living under a rock (at least a digital rock) take a look at the RE of games or the stuff people are doing. Cost is not an issue for these thing. Groups of people pooling together their token budgets to do this.

I was replying to a hypothetical world in which 3D games were hosted on a Stadia-like platform exclusively. Thats hard to copy for an AI, because the work of doing so is very slow and expensive even assuming technology improvements.

It’s easier to roughly copy, sure. As you say, examples of that exist. But outright cloning a game with only streaming/realtime content available? No decompilations, 3D asset parsing, or ability to run lots of simultaneous game loops? That would take ages and/or break the bank.

I’m not saying AIs are technically incapable of doing this. Rather, I’m saying that Stadia-as-DRM makes the act of copying technically infeasible (costly, slow).

Let's assume you are right. Do you think people are going to buy or use that service when the alternative is free software forever?

I don't know. I want to say "no", and I think you want me to, too. But I've lived awhile and seen a lot of extremely accessible free (as in beer, as in freedom, as in "nobody will know" stolen, as in free-with-blockable-ads, and so on...) software rise and fall, and I've seen many payware alternatives (sometimes outright inferior ones) remain competitive long after your logic says they should. So ... I don't know.

no access to binary or source code of the application

And now, we have to use a web browser for all of our professional software. fun times.

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50028275

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