analyzing-ios-binaries

analyzing-ios-binaries is a skill for Claude Code from trilwu/secskills. It costs 94 tokens per session (1,938 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide to examining iPhone and iPad application binaries. It covers IPA files, which are app packages, and the native Objective-C and Swift code inside them.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to inspect app bundles, embedded frameworks, extensions, classes, Swift types, exported symbols, and native libraries.
Why use it?
App Store binaries may be encrypted when downloaded, so static analysis tools cannot read them until a decrypted copy is obtained. The guide also helps when class or type information is missing or unclear.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the secskills-core plugin — 30 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to inspect app bundles, embedded frameworks, extensions, classes, Swift types, exported symbols, and native libraries.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/trilwu/secskills/analyzing-ios-binaries
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add trilwu/secskills --skill analyzing-ios-binaries
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/trilwu/secskills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install secskills-core, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 30 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for analyzing-ios-binaries

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/trilwu/secskills/analyzing-ios-binaries/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/trilwu/secskills/analyzing-ios-binaries)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/trilwu/secskills/analyzing-ios-binaries"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/trilwu/secskills/analyzing-ios-binaries/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for analyzing-ios-binaries

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/trilwu/secskills/analyzing-ios-binaries"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/trilwu/secskills/analyzing-ios-binaries.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 94 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,938 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 4 findings, up to high

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • high Privilege Escalation · line 83
    Code accesses credential files (SSH keys, AWS credentials, etc.). This could indicate credential theft attempts.
    Fix: Remove references to credential paths. Use environment variables or secrets managers. For docs, use placeholder paths (e.g., /path/to/config). Never load .env or token files in production code paths.
  • high Privilege Escalation · line 101
    Code accesses credential files (SSH keys, AWS credentials, etc.). This could indicate credential theft attempts.
    Fix: Remove references to credential paths. Use environment variables or secrets managers. For docs, use placeholder paths (e.g., /path/to/config). Never load .env or token files in production code paths.
  • medium Rogue Agent · line 156
    Skill establishes unauthorized persistence across sessions via cron jobs, startup scripts, or state files. Session persistence allows an attacker to maintain access beyond the current interaction.
    Fix: Remove any persistence mechanisms (cron jobs, startup scripts, state files). Skills should not maintain state across sessions without explicit user consent.
  • medium Rogue Agent · line 179
    Skill establishes unauthorized persistence across sessions via cron jobs, startup scripts, or state files. Session persistence allows an attacker to maintain access beyond the current interaction.
    Fix: Remove any persistence mechanisms (cron jobs, startup scripts, state files). Skills should not maintain state across sessions without explicit user consent.
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00094 $0.01938
Opus 5 $0.00047 $0.00969
Sonnet 5 $0.00019 $0.00388
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00194

Measured 10d ago against content hash f64c46d4b7ec, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

analyzing-ios-binaries scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 10d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

secskills-core/skills/analyzing-ios-binaries/SKILL.md · 189 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 189 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Analyzing iOS Binaries

App Store binaries are encrypted at rest and decrypted by the kernel at load time, so every static tool fails on a downloaded IPA until you dump the decrypted image from memory. That single step gates everything else, and it is the reason most iOS analysis stalls before it starts.

When to Use

  • You have an IPA or .app bundle and need to read the binary
  • class-dump returns nothing or garbage
  • otool shows cryptid 1
  • You need to enumerate Objective-C classes, Swift types, or exported symbols
  • Analyzing embedded frameworks, app extensions, or dynamic libraries

When NOT to Use

  • Android targets — use testing-mobile-applications or the relevant reversing-* skill
  • The wider iOS assessment (storage, keychain, IPC) — use testing-mobile-applications
  • TLS interception — use bypassing-mobile-pinning
  • Jailbreak detection blocking your tooling — use bypassing-root-jailbreak-detection first
  • Cross-platform frameworks — Flutter, Unity, and Xamarin have their own skills; use them for the managed layer and this one for the native shell

Check Encryption First

otool -l TargetApp | grep -A5 LC_ENCRYPTION_INFO
# cryptid 1  → FairPlay-encrypted, decrypt before anything else
# cryptid 0  → already decrypted (dev build, or you already dumped it)

Everything downstream is meaningless on an encrypted binary. class-dump returning nothing is almost always this, not obfuscation.

# Decrypt on a jailbroken device by dumping the loaded image
frida-ios-dump -l                 # list installed apps
frida-ios-dump com.target.app     # produces a decrypted IPA
bagbak com.target.app             # alternative, handles extensions/frameworks well

# Rootless jailbreaks and TrollStore installs work with the same tools
# Older devices: Clutch, flexdecrypt

Dump frameworks and extensions too, not just the main binary. PlugIns/ (share sheets, widgets, keyboards) and Frameworks/ carry their own encrypted Mach-Os, and app extensions frequently hold the interesting entitlements and a weaker security posture than the main app.

Read the full file on GitHub · 189 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 10d ago First seen · 189 lines · 94 tokens per session scan A f64c46d4b7ec

Subscribe to this mod's changes

analyzing-ios-binaries is a skill published in the GitHub repository trilwu/secskills (138 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 94 tokens to every session and 1,938 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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