Cracking Electron Apps Open | Hacker News Reader

Cracking Electron Apps Open

fasterthanli.me

80 pointslukastyrychtr13 comments

A few cools things I learned from this article:

- 7z is a pretty awesome tool if I ever need to unpack archives and don't know the specific program or command arguments to do it myself

- .dmg, .deb, and .rpm files are really just standard archive files, not file formats by themselves (I knew they were archives previously, just didn't know you could just open these with standard tools such as 7z)

- macOS App Translocation exists [0] (never heard of this before, possibly because I don't use mac)

- GNU ar [1] is a thing that exists (of course I know about GNU Tar [2] and use it a lot, never heard about GNU ar or its UNIX counterpart before though). Tangentially, I also discovered POSIX does not use the tar command anymore and instead goes for pax instead for some reason since POSIX.1-2001.

Was expecting a lousy post due to some typos in the text, also not necessarily interested in Electron but got pleasantly surprised and learned a ton about a variety of things.

[0]: https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/724969

[1]: https://ftp.gnu.org/old-gnu/Manuals/binutils-2.12/html_node/...

[2]: https://www.gnu.org/software/tar/

> I also discovered POSIX does not use the tar command anymore and instead goes for pax instead for some reason since POSIX.1-2001.

I don't have any knowledge on that topic, but I do know that the linux kernel doesn't use tar for the initramfs because it was deemed too complicated and unstandardized.

> - .dmg, .deb, and .rpm files are really just standard archive files, not file formats by themselves

Isn't DMG a filesystem image, not an archive? (.deb and .rpm are indeed archives.)

Yes (more like squashfs, which is what AppImage is, I forgot to mention that), although honestly the border between "filesystem images" and "archives" is tenuous.

I've created read-write DMGs with Disk Utility because you can encrypt them with a password. Basically first-party VeraCrypt without FUSE.

Though, when my MacBook broke and I had to switch back to Windows, I had to migrate it into an actual VeraCrypt volume.

The tool I used for this... was mounting the volumes on both machines and then using SFTP to copy the files themselves.

Ok I know I shouldn't let that get to me, but, re: "Was expecting a lousy post due to some typos in the text"

A) that's... rude/gatekeepy? B) what typos? I simply cannot find what you're talking about

Stylistic choices are not typos, I wonder if there hasn't been some mixup there? Folks usually use the feedback system to report typos, which then get fixed. You're probably not gonna see this so shrug, but, for the record: not cool.

Off topic a bit, but this is just amazing how only now Windows gets various archives native support. This kind of "Windows personality" just makes me hate this OS.

They don't listen to their customers; everything is slow and requires gaming hardware; Cortana was a huge integration into Windows and they eventually abandoned it; tracking and telemetry if you don't disable through regedit; many more.

Also, happy independence day!

Old windows ppl are not at helm. New windows ppl are calling the shots. Windows like any other major software has change in leadership every few years. Maybe the newer ppl recognise and fix the pain points left by old windows ppl and new leadership supports that

Looks like this deals with vanilla electron not using any of the available ways of protecting the source

Why would they protect the source?

https://github.com/jgraph/drawio

The article posted on Hacker News is called "Cracking Electron Apps Open". The article deals with none of the libs developed to make it hard to crack open Electron apps. So it feels like clickbait and perhaps this will save someone a click.

Many of those ways just obfuscate the source or encrypt some files; they don't prevent the Electron packaging format from being opened. While that reduces most of the reasons for "cracking" the app open, there's still often useful information to be gleamed by doing so.

Entirely useless distinction. Although if for you "crack open an app" can mean "see a bunch of opaque blobs" then sure.

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