Putting the Hopper to Work: Broken Preferences Edition

ecf1b5c2b2d2930afe3e7285ceb0825c Just a quick one: Today I was trying to replace a preference file that we install via a package with a profile. It just didn’t work. Restore the plist file and it worked fine. This mystified me, and initially I thought I was just doing something wrong. And then I had an inkling of what could be happening.

I tossed the binary for the software-in-question into the Hopper dissambler and started searching for references to CFPreferences and to the path for the plist file. Sure enough, I was able to follow through the code and determine that the software created a proper plist, but that it was manually creating and reading that plist file; it didn’t use the preferences system to get its preferences.

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