Suppose you have a Macintosh without a TPM. This, of course, is highly likely because only the first few x86-based Macintosh models had TPMs. Now suppose you really want to experiment with Trusted Computing or features of the TPM in general. Your needs could be development-related or they could be purely academic. Well, you [...]
XBinary is software that lets you add kernel-level support for executing arbitrary binary formats on Mac OS X. To read more about it and to download it, visit the XBinary page.
By popular demand, I’ve "ported" AncientFS to Linux and FreeBSD. It was reasonably straightforward. Largely on purpose, AncientFS depends on the cross-platform interfaces of MacFUSE for the most part.
Most people don’t realize that MacFUSE is much more than a "Mac OS X implementation of the FUSE API." Of course, the name "MacFUSE" doesn’t help much [...]
Here are some extended notes on understanding, compiling, and using AncientFS, the file system I talked about in the previous blog post.
There has been much buzz about new features and functionality in MacFUSE 2.0. Besides the MacFUSE 2.0 release, there are still more new and interesting things to be discussed in the realm of user-space file systems. As I described and briefly demonstrated during my recent talk at the Googleplex, I wrote several new user-space file [...]
Recently, I had a need to know if any files or folders had been modified or created on an HFS+ volume in the past N seconds. There are many ways you could generate this type of information on Mac OS X.
To begin with, you could try asking Spotlight.
Besides Spotlight, Mac OS X has a rich [...]
1200 Baud Archaeology
Here is a unique computer puzzle: the audio file (MP3 encoding) contains something that could well be music to many a hacker’s ears. What is it? Can you "prove" that it is what you say it is?
A Myth That Won’t Die
Several years ago, while I was working at the IBM Almaden Research Center, we came up with a security mechanism called the Assured Execution Environment (AxE). We had implementations for Windows XP and Mac OS X. (Although AxE supports code signing as a feature, it’s not the same—in any case, this was long before code [...]
Details on taking a snapshot of the memory and register state of a running process on Mac OS X, including source for a user-space program that does that.
People are welcome to join us at Google on Thursday, May 24, for an open-to-public talk on all things MacFUSE. I’m told that “Doors open at 6:30PM at Google’s Mountain View campus. Guests should plan to sign in at Building 41 reception upon arrival. Refreshments will be served…”
Here’s an abstract:
File systems provide one of the [...]
I’ve made available a MacFUSE-Based process file system for Mac OS X. Source code is included.
I gave a talk titled “Taming Mac OS X File Systems” at Macworld 2007 today. I also announced Google’s open source release of MacFUSE. Here are some relevant links:
The MacFUSE Page on Google Code
List of Wiki Articles on the Project Page
Slides from the Talk
Besides internal tech demos that I demonstrated during the talk, I’ve tested [...]
Read about how to enable trusted computing on Mac OS X. The document’s coverage includes:
A discussion of the TPM hardware present in certain Macintosh computers
Release of an open source TPM driver for Mac OS X
Release of a Mac OS X port of an open source trusted computing software stack
An overview of using the driver and [...]
I have released a new version (2.5) of hfsdebug. The new version fixes a bug in the calculation of free space blocks on a volume, and now all features are supported on both the PowerPC and x86 versions of Mac OS X. In particular, hfsdebug no longer uses the /dev/kmem device for displaying kernel-memory-resident mount [...]