low-level loader

PNG Steganography from First Principles

Steganography is experiencing a revival as a wrapper for delivering payloads. In this post we'll go back to basics and show just how steganography can be applied to a PNG image using the common least significant bit (LSB) encoding technique. No magic... just raw information... and a little C++.

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PNG Steganography from First Principles
macos loader

Building a Custom Mach-O Memory Loader for macOS - Part 1

In this blog we'll look at what it takes to construct an in-memory loader for Mach-O bundles within MacOS Ventura without using dyld. We'll walk though the lower-level details of what makes up a Mach-O file, how dyld processes load commands to map areas into memory, and how we can emulate this to avoid writing payloads to disk.

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Building a Custom Mach-O Memory Loader for macOS - Part 1
macos dyld

Restoring Dyld Memory Loading

Up until recently, we've enjoyed in-memory loading of Mach-O bundles courtesy of dyld and its NSCreateObjectFileImageFromMemory/NSLinkModule API methods. And while these methods still exist today, there is a key difference.. memory modules are now persisted to disk. So in this post we'll take a look at just what was changed in dyld, and see what we can do to restore this functionality... hopefully keeping our warez in memory for a little longer.

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Restoring Dyld Memory Loading