I have a closed-source 3rd party program, and I want to be able to
- Know what memory is allocated to the program
- Access that memory (read only is fine)
Utilities like vmmap(1), heap(1), and leaks(1) seem to have similar functionality to what I need, but I can’t find their source anywhere (the OS X versions) and can’t figure out how they work. Preferably, this would all be done in user-space, possibly running as root, I don’t want to write kernel code for the purpose of bypassing memory protection if I can avoid it.
I tried using shared memory passing the address of what I want to read as the 2nd argument to shmat(2), but this was ultimately unsuccessful (and probably not its intended usage and/or bad practice) and still left me without a way to determine what memory I’m looking for anyway (the program who owned the memory had to report its address to me).
Is there a way to just disable memory protection for a certain program so that it won’t segfault when it tries to read/write memory that is allocated to a different process? Is there a better way that wouldn’t enable bugs to seriously corrupt my entire system?
How is this achieved?
I don’t have access to an OS X machine, but this looks very similar to what you’re trying to do:
Reading Other Process' Memory in OS X?
Here’s an archive of the link that doesn’t work:
http://web.archive.org/web/20090627062246/http://www.matasano.com/log/1100/what-ive-been-doing-on-my-summer-vacation-or-it-has-to-work-otherwise-gdb-wouldnt/