Low Level iOS Developer

Daily tasks

An indicative overview of the main daily activities for this job position are the following (but they are not limited only to these topics):

• Low level engineering and development in (mainly) both Objective-C and C++.
• Maintenance and support of an extensive project, currently in production. Project’s code base: C++ and Objective-C. Supported platforms: multiple platform architecture, supporting both Android and iOS.
• Static and dynamic analysis of system and third party apps in iOS ecosystem, core iOS services, native daemons and libraries (RE, tracing, debugging, instrumentation, network monitoring etc).
• Analysis and evaluation of the iOS security model, both existing and new protections and mitigations.
• Research various topics, related to the iOS ecosystem and internals (user space or kernel), application layer, programming, obfuscation, mitigation bypasses etc.
• Reverse engineering apps and private apple frameworks, explore undocumented procedures and functionalities.
• Documentation and knowledge sharing sessions with your teammates.
• Automated and manual tests to ensure high stability and performance of your implementations.
• Development of tools and utilities that will help the team to perform research tasks, automated testing and overall to speed up and streamline the maintenance and support of our product.

Expectations

Looking for a low level software engineer with prior extensive experience (must) in the following areas and fields:

• 3+ years of work experience.
• Darwin: iOS and OS X ecosystem (iOS and OS X internals, both userspace and kernel. iOS/OS X security model, protections and mitigations, iOS application sandboxing model. Application runtime and dynamic library/framework loading and linking, code signing, entitlements, private frameworks, dyld shared cache extraction. HAL Layer: hardware related libraries, services and daemons. Core iOS/OS X system apps, services, daemons and libraries).
• Low level programming (C/C++, Objective-C, Assembly arm64, system API/Syscalls, Native Libraries, public and private frameworks).
• Debugging both native and iOS apps/services (LLDB, remote debugging, instruments).
• Reverse engineering both native binaries and iOS apps (IDA Pro/Ghidra/Binary Ninja, good understanding of ARM64 assembly).
• Dynamic analysis and instrumentation (Frida, Cydia Substrate, hooking, app calls and system calls tracing, network traffic inspection, Burp Suite).
• Cryptography fundamentals: symmetric and asymmetric algorithms, hash functions, encoding. Utilizing such algorithms to ensure confidentiality and integrity of data in your projects.
• Network fundamentals: TCP/IP, OSI model, major protocols and their underlying fundamentals, like TCP, UDP, HTTP(S)/TLS/mTLS.
• Familiar with procedures for jailbreaking, jailbreak tools, installation of tweaks, sideloading apps.

Bonus points if the candidate has prior experience or if familiar with the following topics:

• Tweak development for iOS.
• Development for hardware, embedded systems. Kernel modules/extensions (C/C++, x86, x86_64, ARM/ARM 64, MIPS).
• Offensive security: post exploitation techniques, shellcoding, code/library injection techniques, process instrumentation and hooking, control flow manipulation, obfuscation, anti-debugging/analysis techniques, manual library loading and linking, parsing Mach-O files.
• Scripting languages for automation: Python, Bash.
• DevOps fundamentals: CI/CD pipelines, Git, Git Workflows, Dockers, Docker Compose, Jenkins, Bamboo from Atlassian.