OrchardNest

Good command-line tools are a pleasure to work with. A feature I'm always grateful for is when the developer took the time to provide an output that is human readable and an output that is easy to pass to another tool for additional...

Lately, I've had to work with multiple AWS accounts, and some of them are ephemeral. I don't want to have them bloating my ~/.aws/credentials file. In this short post, I'll show you how to manage multiple AWS accounts using the...

Upgrading any legacy application is a headache. You are trying to pay a technical debt of years in a couple of weeks or months. It isn't easy, but it is also the best time to get things right for the next time you need to do an...

I've been using GitHub Actions on a few projects now, and I find them like the future of what bash scripting was back in the day. I feel I can do pretty much everything in a quick and concise way. In this post, I'll show you the...

macOS comes with a good set of predefined security features designed to keep us safe, e.g. System Integrity Protection. These security features are great for everyday use, but they get in the way when we are trying to analyse what...

First, remember create a new branch for the changes, we can do that using Xcode or the git(1) command-line tool. Table of Contents The basic support Allowing the user to set the theme Storing the user preferences on...

Building a network application requires a good amount of effort, not only because of the complexities of the application you are building but also by the nature of network architecture. We have to define how are we going to handle the...

The ncurses(3) library powers many popular text-based applications, for example, emacs(1) and htop(1). The use of ncurses is not required to build text-based applications. We could use escape sequences. And for small command-line tools...

Vim is my preferred text editor, and I do most of my writing on markdown. If you haven't used markdown, I encourage you to try it out. Markdown is a simple markup language that is in common use on the internet for static site...

Shoulder surfing is a real threat. And we, as software developers, should strive to provide safety to our users. One way to mitigate the inadvertent exposure of sensitive data is related to how we handle the input of sensitive data in our...

Operating systems have provided command-line interfaces for decades now, and all but the simplest command-line tools require argument parsing. Due to years of use and refinement, there are many expectations on how command-line tools should...

One of the first steps we take when analysing a macOS (or *OS) app is to go through the entitlements to extract useful information. Usually, we search for the entitlements embedded in the application binary using codesign(1) in our Static...

When performing dynamic analysis, a useful source of information is examining the process' memory for specific patterns. For example, imagine we would like to obtain information about the current process' code signature. To get...

When we are asked to perform a black-box security analysis on an iOS app, depending on the scope, we might only have access to the iOS app from the AppStore. But most of the time, the client would give us an IPA. In a black-box analysis,...