苹果是否允许在iPhone应用中使用tcpdump

Question

I'm planning to use tcpdump for development of an iPhone app. But i'm not sure will Apple allow it or not with iOS 8.0 onwards to be used in iPhone app development.

Please provide your comments on this

Thanks

Answer 1

You won't be able to open a BPF device on iOS - by default, XNU creates BPF devices with permissions rw-------, owned by root, so even if a process running in a sandbox (which all non-Apple iOS applications - and probably most Apple iOS applications - on a non-jailbroken iOS machine are) is allowed to open files in /dev , your program won't be able to capture network traffic.

I also think sandboxed applications may not be allowed to fork and exec or posix_spawn() arbitrary programs, so your application probably wouldn't be able to run tcpdump as a program - assuming it's even shipped with iOS, which it might not be.

You might be able to incorporate tcpdump code in your application, but without being able to capture traffic, all it will be able to do is to read existing captures, and that's probably easier to do on your Mac.

So this is probably a project of interest only on a jailbroken machine.