anchore / anchore/syft

Add Mach-O security feature detection

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binary-analysis enhancement
Dominant language
Go
Stars
9.6k
Forks
962
Avg merge
23h 27m
Merged PRs (30d)
48

Description

ELF security feature detections was added in https://github.com/anchore/syft/pull/2443 . It would be nice to also add this same kind of features but for darwin (Mach-O formatted binaries).

Proposed features to detect:

  • Code signing, we could reuse/import functions from anchore/quill to do this.
  • PIE (same as in ELF)
  • Non-Executable stack/heap flags (similar to DEP in PE formatted files)
  • Stack canaries
  • Hardened runtimes, detectable in the binary's entitlements (there might be a function in anchore/quill for this)

There may be more features to detect that I'm unaware of.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by reviewing the ELF security feature detection added in pull request 2443 and investigate how Mach-O binaries are handled in Syft. Compare the proposed code signing, PIE, executable stack/heap, stack canary, and hardened runtime detections, including possible functions from anchore/quill. Done means agreeing on the supported Mach-O feature set and adding equivalent detections.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
go
Domain
reverse-engineering, security
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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