The Hacker's Guide to OS X

Chapter 3

The Filesystem

Introduction

As a hacker, you’re likely already aware that the success of any particular project you’re working on at the time is heavily dependent on the depth of your knowledge within that area. You’re not going to sit down at your computer and write an exploit for the first time without having an understanding of Assembly and shell code. The same is certainly true when we look at hacking the Mac OS X operating system. You have to learn the details before you can start experimenting on your own.

As far as hacking goes, this chapter might seem fairly lame. You can’t perform a drive-by of a user’s home directory, nor will you be able to overflow the bashrc file, resulting in root access. No, hacking within the file system ...