Monthly Archives: June 2020

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Don't let numbers make one numb to others feelings

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Today is my first time going home from work after 9 PM in this company, but that's not important. What I want to talk about and matters is that, one of my colleague seems to be emotionally hurt by another colleague from our quants depts.

People in quants depts usually deal with data, lots of data. And of course, most, if not all, are numbers. However, if one work with numbers for a really long time, it can magically make people numb to others feelings.

In this morning, I heard that a colleague from quants depts (will use Q for shorthand) talked with our ops (will use O for short). There seemed to be a log analyser should be changed by O to meet the standard in Q's depts. But the task contains some specific terms in quants, and O cannot be sure about the meaning for some fields with these quant terms. Then Q said something really harsh to O, "I feel it's very difficult to have you understood", "Why don't you ask me for explanation earlier?!", "It almost makes me feel angry to talk with you!".

Well, I don't really think that Q was trying to communicate with others at that time. Intentionally or not, Q seemed to be numb with others feelings. Though O wasn't starting any argument with Q, O became depressed a day long. Moreover, during the weekly meeting in this afternoon, O looked his own phone for a few seconds, and the big boss asked him to stop looking at the phone with a little bit anger.

Yes, the second one is really a small case. But it is the last straw that breaks the camel's back. After the weekly meeting, our leader also found that O was in depress and wanted to have a talk with him. It not to my surprise that O refused the talk and said to the leader, "If you or boss is unhappy with my work, you or he can just fire me, that OK. It's late and I don't want to talk anything now. I just want to go home, otherwise I'll miss the last subway."

It may sound childish, but IMHO, it's better than numb / indifference in some way.

As a matter of fact, I'm thinking about to learn some quant skills recently. But I don't want to be numb or indifference to others. Are numbers making one numb? Or themselves? Perhaps both, perhaps we are just making excuse so that numbers are the ones to be blamed instead of ourselves.

Rust Learning

Rust Learning from Zero (21) —— All I need is a dlsym | Exploit macOS application with Rust

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It has been a long time since my last reverse engineering on macOS, and that was about Netease Cloud Music. 

But I always write that in Objective-C, perhaps I should try something different, let's say, Rust.

  1. Compile a .dylib that macOS recognises
  2. Build a Constructor Function that Invokes on dylib Loading
  3. All I need is a dlsym
    1. Find the Symbol You Want
    2. Casting to Function Pointer
  4. Compile and Hook

1. Compile a .dylib that macOS recognises

The first step is to tell cargo that what we need is a library

cargo new --lib exploit

And cargo will create these files for us.

exploit
├── Cargo.toml
└── src
    └── lib.rs

However, if we compile this project, the output library has a suffix .rlib. which suggests that this is a Rust library. Yet we need a dylib that macOS recognises.

Therefore the hint for producing a .dylib library should be added in Cargo.toml, which is shown below.

[lib]
crate-type = ["dylib"]

This tells cargo out crate type is a dylib, which satisfies the format requirements of macOS dynamic library.

Continue reading Rust Learning from Zero (21) —— All I need is a dlsym | Exploit macOS application with Rust →