Security Protections

Searching Fails in Mac App due to System Protections

If an alert comes up that states searching fails in a Mac App due to system protections, this means Bit Slicer is unable to access this particular application's memory. This may be due to System Integrity Protection which to paraphrase is a security feature that prevents software from messing around with system owned content.

The feature also includes a protection used to prevent software and debuggers, like Bit Slicer, from accessing or injecting code into applications that opt into it. As time progresses on, more software besides Apple's applications may sign themselves into this protection. This means that while some applications are further protected from being hampered, Bit Slicer may not be able to access and manipulate them. One way around this is to temporarily disable the system wide protection and re-enable the protection after debugging to keep the system secure.

iOS App Store Apps are Unsupported

Macs with Apple Silicon can run iOS apps downloaded from the App Store. These applications require System Integrity Protection and increased security protections to run on macOS. This thus means that Bit Slicer cannot be used to target any iOS app downloaded from the App Store.

Filtering of Apple Applications

By default, on macOS 10.11 or later, Bit Slicer doesn't show any of Apple's applications or processes. Not only are these applications protected from the system protection above, but users are also typically not interested in targeting them. This filtering can be disabled however by executing the following command in Terminal and re-launching Bit Slicer:

defaults write com.zgcoder.BitSlicer ZGRemoveRootlessProcessesKey -bool NO