Reverse engineering Sublime Text

Sound

Reverse Engineering: Cracking Sublime Text 3Notice: This post does not endorse piracy. It's purpose is merely educational. Decompiling and cracking software is illegal in most cases.

OS X native software is written in Objective-C, a superset of C which is not very hard to hack away. In this post I will try to demonstrate the basics of reverse engineering in said platform.

The goal

Our goal will be to stop the annoying Sublime Text pop-up from reminding you to buy a license each now and then (but you totally should if you are going to use it). I will be using Sublime Textlatest build in the time of writting, 3114, for OS X 64-bit.

For the disassembling + patching I will be using Hopper, a disassembler for Mach0 and ELFexecutables which also provides handy C-like pseudo-code.

Requisites

• Basic software development experience
• Basic assembly knowledge
• Basic C knowledge
  

Getting started

First time you open a disassembled binary it looks scary. There is a ton of code and it is not very readable, so we need some references to get started.
Strings are a good starting point as they are coded as clear text ASCII in the binary itself.

In this case it is a particularly good idea as what we are trying to do is stop a string from showing. So, to begin with, we'll be searching for the string contained on the pop-up with Hopper's built in string search.

http://blog.fernandodominguez.me/cracking-sublime-text-3/

woshiyjjwudi

i tkink that is good

ywqn

very ok! original! thanks a lot!

冥界3大法王

This version is for IOS.

ehack

I don't quite get it, but I think you are really terrific

isaacchen

Seems  not working on build3140. and I cannot follow on "Nevertheless, to gain a better understanding of what this procedure does let's use the asm to pseudo-code functionality built on Hopper." this.