In my recent post on OS X Helper Applications, I provided some sample code for installing and launching a helper application.

The host application and the helper communicated using distributed objects (NSConnection), running over mach ports (NSMachPort).

At the time, I was aware of the advice in Apple Tech Note 2083: Daemons and Agents which recommends against using mach ports, but I wanted to get something up and running, and the NSMachPort method was the one that seemed to be best documented.

However, after a lot of searching around and poring over some very sparse documentation, I’ve now got a version of the code working using NSSocketPort with unix domain sockets (AF_UNIX style sockets), which the tech note recommends as a good way to do IPC.

Tracking down all the details for this proved to be pretty hard work, and I had to glean various bits of information from a lot of disparate sources - tech notes, email threads and sample code.

The tough bits included:

• getting NSSocketPort to use unix domain sockets
• then getting NSConnection to work with them
• getting launchd to launch a task on-demand when a unix domain socket is hit
• getting the actual socket out of launchd in the server task

I’ve now updated my sample code to include all this good stuff - hopefully it will help someone else out in the future.

As a result of this the sample is a tiny bit more complex, and I’ve also taken the opportunity to refactor some stuff into utility classes. Because these are pretty useful I’ve pulled in my ECFoundation framework, and located some of them in there. However, the sample still doesn’t need the vast majority of ECFoundation, so I haven’t linked to the framework, I’ve just pulled in the source files that I need.

Check out the github repo for more details.

Whatever this time of year means to you, for us it means a few hard-earned days of rest, and probably far too much eating and drinking!

As a result, things will be quiet round here for the next week or two. If you happen to attempt to get in touch, please forgive us if we’re a bit slower than usual in responding.

If you’re on holiday too, we hope you have a good one! If not… well we hope you have a jolly nice time whilst it’s so quiet!

See you all in 2012 I hope.

Following on from my Helper Applications sample project, I’ve created another sample which focusses on how to do code-injection.

In particular this sample makes and installs a helper application who’s job is to inject some code into another application (by default the Finder).

The injected code adds a menu to the application’s menubar, with a single item in it that just logs stuff to the console.

Once again the project is based on existing examples, but attempts to present things in a slightly cleaner / simpler way.

It uses Wolf Rentzsch’s mach_star to do the heavy lifting for the injection task.

You can find it on github.

Once again I should point out that this example pretty much ignores security when it comes to the inter-process communication between the host application, the injection helper, and the injected code. Which isn’t to say that it’s not useful, simply that you’d have to batten it down far tighter if you want to avoid opening up some potentially horrible security holes.

In the sample, the helper is launched on demand, and only does the injection in response to a command from something else. In a real-world scenario, I guess it would make more sense for it to watch for the target app to launch and do the injection then. It would also make more sense if the various parameters were embedded into the helper to lock it down. However, in it’s current form, I guess the sample could form the basis of some sort of application-enhancer style system allowing multiple client applications to inject code into multiple targets.

I’ve recently been looking at how to set up a helper application (one that either runs all the time as a background task, or on demand, potentially with system permissions).

Apple has a few samples in this area, but they’re not all that complete, sometimes not cocoa-centric, and I found them a bit confusing.

After a fair bit of puzzling it out I’ve created my own sample (a modified version of a couple of theirs), and I’ve put it up on github in the hope that it might help someone else. Here’s the read me file for the project:

About ECHelper

This is based on Apple’s SMJobBless example, which shows how to cleanly install a helper tool that needs to run with privileges as a launchd task.

Staying Consistent

The biggest problem with this task is that the helper tool and the host application that’s going to install it have to be set up very carefully to have the right code-signing details and bundle ids.

If you wanted to change these in the SMJobBless example you had to do it in lots of different places - and it was easy to miss one.

This sample gets round that problem by setting three user-defined values at the project level, in the Settings.xcconfig file:

HELPER_ID = com.elegantchaos.helper.helper
HOST_ID = com.elegantchaos.helper.host
HELPER_SIGNING = 3rd Party Mac Developer Application: Sam Deane

You should set HELPER_ID to the bundle id that you want to use for your helper application.

You should set HOST_ID to the bundle id that you want to use for the host application - the one that installs the helper (and which probably makes use of it, although that’s not necessarily the case).

You should set HELPER_SIGNING to the code signing profile that you want to use to sign everything. Note that if this profile is associated with a bundle id pattern (eg. com.elegantchaos.*) then the HELPER_ID and HOST_ID settings must match the pattern, otherwise xcode will refuse to sign the applications.

The name of the profile is embedded in various places, and it’s important that they all match exactly what’s in the certificate. For this reason you need to specify an exact profile name here (like “3rd Party Mac Developer Application: Sam Deane”), rather than a wildcard (like “3rd Party Mac Developer Application: *”).

Building The Plists

The tricky part of all of this is that the host application needs one plist, and the helper application two, and both of them make reference to the three values defined above.

What’s more, you can’t rely on Xcode’s variable substitution to fill in all of these values. Two of the plists are embedded in the __TEXT section of the helper application, which is a simple binary and therefore doesn’t live in a bundle. These are embedded with some special linker commands, and it appears that Xcode (and the underlying linker tools) don’t pre-process the lists in passing.

Even with the other plist (which is used for the host application) has a complication to it, because one of the special keys in it is a dictionary where a key needs to be replaced by the value of HELPER_ID. It appears that Xcode’s plist pre-processing doesn’t affect keys, only values, so you can’t use a variable in the key to fill in the correct value.

The way I’ve got round this is to add build scripts to both targets which take the original plists and perform the substitutions. The various linking stages then use the output of these scripts as their inputs.

In theory these derived plists should probably go into ${DERIVED_FILE_DIR}, so that they are hidden out of the way.

However, it seems that Xcode needs to be able to find them when the build starts, because they are set as the Info.plist to use for the targets. When I tried hiding them away in the build folder, Xcode couldn’t seem to cope, so instead I’ve added them to the project as “proper” resource files. Each time you build, they’ll be regenerated. Luckily though, Xcode (and git) don’t see them as having changed unless they actually do change (because you change the values of the variables mentioned above).

Example Helper

I’ve also expanded the example to illustrate one way to actually communicate with the helper application.

This example uses distributed objects, which is NOT a particularly secure way to do things. Assuming that your helper is running with enhanced priveleges of some sort, it obviously becomes a potential attack vector for things that are trying to take over your system. DO is big and powerful, and complicated, and thus hard to secure.

In reality you should probably use something simpler, like sending simple bytecode across a NSMachPort or NSSocketPort.

I’m very pleased to announce that Neu 1.2 is now live on the Mac App store, as well as available for download from this site.

This version has quite an extensive list of changes and improvements, including reorganised preferences, some new substitutions, and a substantial overhaul of the main UI.

Check out the release notes for full details.