Reverse Engineering on OS X

For the past several years I've been a developer at Mozilla, specializing in OS X and particularly in fixing bugs that happen only on OS X. Since many of these bugs involve third party apps (for example plugins) or the OS itself, I've had to learn a lot about reverse engineering on OS X. This an attempt to distill my experience, acquired over the last few years, into something like a tutorial. I hope people will be able to learn from it, and even become excited about it!

Steven Michaud, 5/2013

Table of Contents

• Why Reverse Engineer?

• Resources

• Techniques

• Example 1: Figuring Out NSView Dirty Rects

• Example 2: Locating the Source of a Problem Using an Error Message

• Example 3: Finding Out How Flash Detects Graphics Hardware

• Example 4: Locating the Source of a Problem Using a Crash Stack