Papers
arxiv:2601.01673

Exposing Hidden Interfaces: LLM-Guided Type Inference for Reverse Engineering macOS Private Frameworks

Published on Jan 4
Authors:
,

Abstract

Private macOS frameworks underpin critical services and daemons but remain undocumented and distributed only as stripped binaries, complicating security analysis. We present MOTIF, an agentic framework that integrates tool-augmented analysis with a finetuned large language model specialized for Objective-C type inference. The agent manages runtime metadata extraction, binary inspection, and constraint checking, while the model generates candidate method signatures that are validated and refined into compilable headers. On MOTIF-Bench, a benchmark built from public frameworks with groundtruth headers, MOTIF improves signature recovery from 15% to 86% compared to baseline static analysis tooling, with consistent gains in tool-use correctness and inference stability. Case studies on private frameworks show that reconstructed headers compile, link, and facilitate downstream security research and vulnerability studies. By transforming opaque binaries into analyzable interfaces, MOTIF establishes a scalable foundation for systematic auditing of macOS internals.

Community

Sign up or log in to comment

Get this paper in your agent:

hf papers read 2601.01673
Don't have the latest CLI?
curl -LsSf https://hf.co/cli/install.sh | bash

Models citing this paper 0

No model linking this paper

Cite arxiv.org/abs/2601.01673 in a model README.md to link it from this page.

Datasets citing this paper 0

No dataset linking this paper

Cite arxiv.org/abs/2601.01673 in a dataset README.md to link it from this page.

Spaces citing this paper 0

No Space linking this paper

Cite arxiv.org/abs/2601.01673 in a Space README.md to link it from this page.

Collections including this paper 0

No Collection including this paper

Add this paper to a collection to link it from this page.