Reverse Engineering the OS: A Practical Guide

Speakers: Mike Lynn

Level: Advanced, Lecture

Excerpt: Let Mike Lynn (frogor/pudquick/mikeymikey) take you on a tour of figuring out how the OS does something – and then making new tools to take advantage of it.

Description: Part of my job – and really the job of any administrator/engineer – is figuring out the root cause of a problem (the “why”) and what can be done to solve it
(the “how”). When working with Macs, it’s not uncommon to see a dialog, menubar, or button that you can click that has some critical piece of information or ability that an end user can manually do that has no command-line tool or configuration profile equivalent. This often makes automation impossible for configurations that may be critical to your work environment. In this presentation, I’ll teach you how to learn to inspect the OS directly with tools like Hopper and turn the results into automation tools with the power of python and pyobjc.


About the speaker

Mike Lynn (Twitter: @mikeymikey) – Client Platform Engineer – Dropbox

Mike Lynn is a Client Platform Engineer at Dropbox in Seattle, Washington. He is obsessed with python and macOS.

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